Everything Leftism on a bicycle

I, Michael Watson, believer in “free markets, constitutional government, and individual liberty,” have a dark secret: I ride a bicycle to work. (Okay, from the railway station to the office. Which is somehow even more stereotypically leftist.) What can I say? If I stay out of cars’ way, it’s actually a pleasant way to get around metropolitan Washington, D.C.

It would, frankly, be more pleasant if the professional activists who claim to improve bicycling would stop helping. Because their “help” too often subordinates the interests of the pedal people to the needs of the Everything Leftist Omnicause.

Down with bike thieves

Among city-traversing bicyclists, the only people more despised than people who illegally park in a marked bike lane are bike thieves, antisocial menaces who disappear oft-beloved machines with de facto impunity. So, you would think that an advocacy coalition for bicyclists would support policy both to secure bicycles (which any cyclist will admit are extremely easy to steal) and to punish thieves in the rare cases in which they are caught.

But then there’s Everything Leftism, which condemns using government authorities to prevent and punish crimes. And few demographics are more Everything Leftist than professional political activists in notoriously “progressive” San Francisco. So, when the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition came to address bike theft, it served up this ideological tripe highlighted negatively on Twitter/X by Bay Area-based venture capitalist Kane Hsieh:

We strongly urge everyone to consider the potential impact of calling the police on this person’s [the possessor of a recovered stolen bicycle] life. […] Black and brown people are often deeply harmed or even killed by interactions with the police, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition decided in 2020 to end any formal relationship with SFPD. Because policing is interwoven into nearly all current solutions to bike theft, some of our recommendations do involve minimal contact with the police, but we identify those and try to propose alternatives. We encourage everyone to consider the potential impact to human life of involving the police in any situation.

Lay aside for the moment the practical impact of a public policy of ignoring bicycle theft on the bicyclists—according to academic research, the often non-white and lower-income bicycle-theft victims—the coalition purports to represent. What is distilled here is the classic Everything Leftist approach to issue analysis. Instead of taking what one might expect to be the single-issue position, even for a largely liberal-to-progressive constituency, that protecting that constituency’s totemic property is important and indeed the core role of a government of laws, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition takes the Everything Leftist position that the police are bad and therefore it is not appropriate to involve them in dealing with bicycle theft.

This is, for class-dynamics reasons, pretty much what one should expect from a representative nonprofit (the nonprofit industry tends to be left-wing) of a left-wing constituency (the GOP is not looking for high-yield voter registrations among urban bicycle commuters) in a very left-wing city (it is, after all, San Francisco), even if some (or even most) of the ostensible constituents might rather follow a more traditional single-issue line.

You gotta fight for your right to…get run over?

The greatest threat to urban bicyclists, other than our own decision-making, is human-driven motor vehicles. They are large, and they move very fast, which, by the formula for kinetic energy, means that if one hits you, it’s not going to be a good day. (If you do just one thing to help bicyclists while driving and parking in the city or even riding as a passenger, consider employing the “Dutch reach” to open a driver-side door into open traffic, whereby you use your right hand to operate the latch, which forces a driver to look to see if bikes, joggers, or even other cars are in position to hit the door.)

So, you would think that advocates for city bicycling would appreciate a new technology that operates motor vehicles more robotically and reliably than the average human can, which should reduce the number of cyclists who have one of the above euphemistic bad days. But autonomous vehicles, which experts expect to operate more safely than human-operated vehicles, run afoul of Everything Leftism, and the dynamic is as above, and there is a labor angle.

Credit Hsieh with finding the labor angle in San Francisco’s bike lanes. As he notes:

While we’re making fun of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, remember that they opposed autonomous vehicles, the most significant safety improvements for cyclists in the century. They did this in [solidarity] with driver unions, who have a history of running over cyclists.

This is a form of the classic labor-green alliance structure, whereby environmentalists and unions remain happy in a shared coalition by joining up to protect unionized workers as environmentalist priorities are adopted. Environmentalists hate cars, regardless of the means of propulsion or operation. (You could even say they are waging a “war on cars.”) Taxi driver unions despise autonomous vehicles for obvious reasons. Thus, the environmentalists—even the bicyclists likely to be protected from serious injury by more competently operated robot cars—and the unions can come together in the name of harmonious Everything Leftism.

This is simply an amusing double case study in how Everything Leftism works in one progressive nonprofit in a very progressive city. The national lesson, if there is one, is that progressive advocacy groups cannot be looked at outside the context of Everything Leftism. When a single-issue constituency might benefit from breaking from the “everything” consensus, coalition dynamics often mean that “everything” wins over the narrow interest.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/everything-leftism-on-a-bicycle/