Bryant Gumbel goes biking

THE CITY THAT loves bicycles, Amsterdam, has a problem with bicycles: The city's drowning in them.

That's what I learned, among other things, from "The Bike Wars," a segment of HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel."

The segment seemed out of place because the focus was bicycles as transportation, not recreation. But if it got a fellow journalist a company-paid trip to Amsterdam and Copenhagen, I'm OK with that.

The segment was balanced, but leaned toward bikes.

How? Every spokes-person interviewed was pro-bike, although the report did - and this is rare - include some criticism of bad bike behavior, which is my long-time complaint.

"Bike Wars" projected (if anyone is listening) a light message of harmony to all combatants in the bike wars - bikers, drivers and pedestrians.

The segment began with video clips, probably from cellphones, of bikers and drivers smashing into each other and cussing each other out. "It's a battle for space," Gumbel says, "between bikers and almost everyone else."

Commuting by bicycle is up 60 percent in 15 years, "yet in many urban centers chaos still reigns," Gumbel says.

The 60 percent increase - which sounds enormous - is magic numbers. The U.S. city with the highest percentage of bike commuters, the show says further on, is Minneapolis, with 6 percent. (It's a piddling 2.3 percent in Philly, according to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.)

Contrast that with Copenhagen's 50 percent, with protected bike lanes, Bryant reports, bike-only highways and bridges and "dedicated stop lights at which bikers really stop when they turn red."

Ah, behavior.

In the States, "Bikers darting in and out of traffic, running red lights with reckless abandon, and pedaling through crowded places at speeds better suited to the Tour de France" tick off many people, says Bryant.

Tell it, brother.

"There is certainly chaos," says Megan Hottman, a championship bicyclist who gets "buzzed" by aggressive drivers. "I get yelled at quite frequently by a motorist telling me to get off the roads and get on the sidewalks," she says.

There are a lot of ignorant drivers who don't know bicycles are not permitted on sidewalks. That's also true for many bicyclists. Bicycles have a right to the road, but not to highways like the Vine Expressway, where a couple of lunkheads took their Indego rentals recently.

Bryant observes some bikers act "as if they're above the law." Two pedestrians were killed within a few weeks by bicyclists in New York's Central Park, while bicyclists are killed at the rate of two a day in America.

Jill Tarlov, 58, mother of two, was one of two killed by bicyclists in Central Park. Her husband never got so much as an apology.

The mother of a young bicyclist killed by a truck turning a corner in San Francisco tearfully says "Some people said she deserved to die, she was riding a bicycle."

That is beyond outrageous. The driver was not charged, nor was the Central Park biker.

One Real Sports fact surprised me: 29 percent of American commuters live within five miles of their jobs. That's not a bad bicycle ride, depending on weather, of course. (It rarely snows in Amsterdam, where 60 percent commute by bike, and there is a massive bike-parking problem.)

Bryant concludes there's great promise "if bikers and motorists can ever learn to coexist on our roads."

That begins with all sides knowing the law - and obeying it. Civility would help, too.

As to the fevered fantasy that Philadelphia, or any American city, will be a Copenhagen clone, that's very unlikely.

Copenhagen was made over because a vast majority of the people wanted it.

That's not the case here.

Phone: 215-854-5977

On Twitter: @StuBykofsky

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