Bicylists Off Balance
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

New Yorkers will no doubt be in support of the city’s police officers as they seek to enforce the law in coming days and weeks against the latest urban eccentricity, the “Critical Mass” bicycle rides that are taking over wide swathes of the streets of Manhattan on the last Friday of every month. This “counter-technology” anti-car movement “spontaneously” combusts to form a convoy of two-wheelers, aiming to force drivers to reappraise their use of motor vehicles. Hitherto, the cyclists have at least adhered to the traffic regulations. But since the Republican National Convention, extreme elements have increasingly come to the fore.
Perhaps the anti-Bush genesis of such “direct action” accounts for the extraordinary tolerance extended by the city’s liberal elites to these bespoke Sandalistas as they career across our boulevards. In consequence, the numbers of cyclists are ballooning; they break away from agreed routes at high speeds; and they run red lights, as if it were a civic virtue, thus blocking cross-town traffic. In one case, an ambulance was blocked. In another in stance, some cyclists ditched the “peace and love” ethos, hammering on the window of an SUV. Not quite the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but certainly far removed from George Orwell’s invocation of innocent spinsters biking through the mist on their way to Holy Communion.
What is to be done? The best outcome would be if the courts forbade Critical Mass cyclists from wilding through the town without a police permit. This would allow the police department to escort the cyclists in one united herd, blocking off some intersections and keeping others open, rather than having them strung out over 30 blocks. In the absence of such judicial sanction, thus far withheld on procedural grounds, officers will have no choice but to arrest lawbreaking riders and, where called for, remove their bicycles.
It’s the kind of situation that makes New Yorkers appreciate what police officers are up against, and they deserve support during these bicycle shenanigans, even if such support has been conspicuously absent in the liberal organs. The real mystery here is ideological. The radical left, which once prided itself on scientific socialist modernity, has increasingly succumbed to Luddite utopianism. Like so many such movements, Critical Mass appears to be ever-more misanthropic, placing the needs of a remote, general humanity ahead of those of actual working human beings.