→ Português tradução para a língua deste artigo.

By now, you may have seen a news report of an incident in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, in which the driver of a Volkwagen Golf drove through a group of more than a hundred cyclists, injuring many of them. Among the injured was Helton de Moraes, a contributor to this website. Happily, he escaped serious injury. Others in the group were not so fortunate, however.

We first learned of Helton’s near brush with death from Marcos Netto, our Southern Hemisphere Correspondent, who went on to describe the melee:

On the evening of Friday, 25 February 2011, about 120 cyclists turned out for Porto Alegre’s Critical Mass [Massa Crítica] gathering. The ride had just started near the downtown district when a driver in a Volkswagen Golf tried to pass the group on a narrow street. The driver lost patience and advanced dangerously toward the group. According to witnesses, the infuriated driver [then] accelerated his car and forced his way through the cyclists, colliding with and striking everybody who was in his path.

The street was instantly transformed into a scene of horror. People were thrown over the car’s hood and roof, and bicycles where reduced to scrap. The homicidal driver continued accelerating through the cyclists before disappearing from sight. Between 50 and 60 cyclists where struck in this assault. Some 20 of them suffered injuries requiring hospital attention, two of them so serious that they are still hospitalized. Fortunately, no one has died. Photos and videos of this horrible incident have spread across the web.

The Golf was later found abandoned, some distance from the scene, with reports suggesting that the license plates had been removed. Despite this, police eventually identified the driver, 47-year-old Ricardo José Neis. A subsequent account in the newspaper Zero Hora describe him as having a “history of traffic infractions reveal[ing] a profile of [a] violent driver.” (The quoted text is from a Google translation of the original story.) The injured cyclists received treatment, some at the scene and others in hospital. All those admitted to hospital have now been discharged.

 

Not surprisingly, this story elicited outraged responses from cyclists around the world. After all, most of us have had our lives threatened at one time or another by motorists who took exception to our presence on the road. I’m no exception here. I was once chased by a driver who seemed determined to kill me. I’ve no idea why he sought me out. We’d been waiting at a light. No words had passed between us, though I did notice he seemed agitated. When the light changed, I turned right. (I’d already signaled my intention, and I was in the right-turn lane.) After several seconds’ hesitation, the driver followed me, swerving from the through lane to the turning lane in order to do so. He then accelerated and did his level best to run me down. I was lucky. I heard his tires squeal, and I had a head start. I escaped by turning into a crowded parking lot and weaving between the parked cars. Unfortunately, my would-be killer escaped, too. I never even got the number on his license plate.

What lies behind such seemingly unprovoked attempts to kill or maim cyclists? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I think it’s largely a question of territory. Motorists, whatever their nationality, often regard the public highways as their private space, and they not infrequently see cyclists as intruders. Luckily, most drivers tolerate our presence on “their” roads. But a dangerous few opt to take direct action. Perhaps this explains the behavior of the driver in the Porto Alegre incident. Subsequent news reports suggest that he was in a hurry, and that he felt “threatened” by the presence of the scores of cyclists on the road alongside him. Whatever the truth of this latter assertion—and I must admit I’m more than a bit skeptical—it’s now abundantly clear that the cyclists in question would have had very good reason to feel threatened by his presence in their midst.

Drivers (and I, too, am a driver) face endless frustrations, to be sure. We rely on our cars to go where we need to go. In some places—rural America, for instance, and, I gather, in Porto Alegre, as well—there is simply no meaningful alternative to the private automobile for any journey longer than a cyclist can easily undertake. Yet even in rural America, motorists spend a lot of their time behind the wheel going nowhere. When Farwell and I cycle into the little college town ten miles from our home to do our weekly shopping, we spend endless minutes idling behind lines of cars—waiting for lights to change, for drivers to finish their cell-phone conversations (or repair their makeup), or for tractor-trailers to clear congested intersections. And we’re as frustrated by these delays as the more impatient drivers often are themselves. In fact, we’ve joked that nothing holds up the smooth flow of traffic like cars.

So why doesn’t our frustration boil over into a murderous rage? Why don’t we attack the feckless drivers who keep us from getting where we need to go as fast as our legs will carry us? Well, I could tell you that this is because we’re good people, that we recognize that the public highway is a shared space and not our private enclave, and that this requires we defer to others from time to time, even when we think those “others”—the hundreds of motorists in their cars—are foolish or inattentive or dilatory. And all of these things are true.

But even if we weren’t good people, there would be another, even more compelling reason for our forbearance: A bicycle doesn’t lend itself to the role of assault vehicle. Once, when Farwell was crossing a busy street, he was struck by a speeding cyclist. Farwell was knocked to ground by the impact, but he got up, brushed himself off, and was soon on his way. The cyclist was less fortunate. He suffered a concussion, and he left the scene in an ambulance. The moral of the story? If a cyclist can’t even run down a pedestrian with impunity, how can he expect to fare against a SUV?

Motorists are free from this constraint, of course. If you’re behind the wheel of even the smallest car, it doesn’t matter how short your stature or how flabby your limbs. You’re the Man. You have the Power. The power to maim or kill any cyclist unlucky enough to get in your way. Effortlessly. And with nearly total impunity. This, at least, is the case in the States—a lamentable conclusion born out by hundreds, if not thousands, of instances when drivers have killed cyclists without ever having to answer so much as a traffic charge. It may not be the case in Brazil, however. Time will tell.

Would I like things to be different in my home country? Would I like to feel confident that the law protects the powerless (cyclists, in this instance) against the powerful (motorists)? Of course I would. After all, in a just world, power imposes commensurate responsibility. And as I’ve already noted, motorists have the power on the public roads. Simple justice would therefore require they bear a corresponding burden of responsibility. But US law is slow to recognize this. So I go about my business on my bike knowing that the laws of my land offers me little or no protection against more powerful road users. Left to my own devices, therefore, I do what I can. I ride with eyes open and my mind clear of distractions. And each day that I cycle away from my door, I hope that I make it home safely. So far, I have. So far, so good.

Tragically, for many cyclists in Porto Alegre, any such hopes were dashed by a single motorist. But one hope remains: the hope that, in protecting the weak and constraining the strong, Brazilian justice proves both swifter and surer than that of the United States. The early indications are promising. May subsequent events live up to this early promise—and may the seed of equal justice for all road users take root in my country, too. Surely that’s not too much to hope for?

 

Here are a number of links that shed further light on the Porto Alegre tragedy:

→ English language-dubbed video of the incident and its aftermath

→ Video of the incident shot by a participant (coverage begins at about 55 seconds)

→ Helton de Moreas’ report (English translation by Google)

→ Zero Hora newspaper report (English translation by Google)

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