#54: Trop is te veel

Enough is enough. After a near-miss with a taxi, it's time to talk about Brussels' bad driver problem

This is a slightly expanded version of a Twitter thread I posted yesterday. You can read that, and the reactions, here.

Yesterday something happened that made me really quite upset. Cycling home from work, a taxi driver tried to run me off the road twice and, together with two other taxi drivers, tried to physically intimidate me.

Here’s what happened, and why it upset me as much as it did.

At the bottom of the Kruidtuin there is a set of lights for a shared bike-bus-taxi lane. I was waiting with another cyclist when a taxi pulled up behind us. The second the light changed, before I had even time to push down on a pedal, the taxi beeped at us.

This is when I made my first mistake. I looked back to see what the problem was. He did not like this. He beeped again, twice, as we all pulled away from the lights. Down the hill towards Rogier I could hear him behind me. I expected him to fly past me. I did not expect his wing mirror to pass a couple of centimetres from my handlebars. This can give you a jump when it’s accidental. It’s particularly frightening when you know it’s been done on purpose.

How do I know it was done on purpose? Because at the next red light, outside the Starbucks in the flying saucer building at Rogier, he slammed on the breaks, swung the driver’s door open, and started coming towards me. I’d pulled up alongside the passenger door between the car and the pavement. He made right for me, shouting the usual stuff about people like me not knowing the rules of the road, and a bunch of other stuff in French I didn't understand. Here’s where I made my second mistake. 

I should have ignored him. I should have just looked straight ahead and avoided the confrontation. I didn’t. I shouted back, asking him what I had done wrong, what his problem was, and telling him he’d driven too close to me. He did not like this either.

This, so far, is a pretty familiar scene for a lot of people who cycle or walk in Brussels. Drivers do this, a lot. Usually, though, it’s from the safety of their front seat. But this guy was obviously emboldened. And this was where it started to get dicey, for me. 

Two other men now appeared from nowhere, shouting to the taxi driver in Arabic, presumably demanding to know what I had done wrong. They shouted at me too, cursing me out and telling me to stop harassing the driver. They squared up to me, the two of them - I assumed they were colleagues but they could have been anyone - close enough I could see the yellow in their eyes and the stains on their teeth. These were, plainly, not here to calm tensions. Their demeanour, their tone, screamed confrontation. Had they or I wanted to, the situation could have escalated quite quickly. Other cyclists who had pulled up at the lights started shouting too, at the driver and these men, to leave it out, to pull up the driver on his bad behaviour, telling him to get back in his car. 

The light turned green and I made my escape. The taxi driver got back in his car and followed after me. 100 metres down the road he swerved towards me again at high speed, with the window open and shouting what I assumed were expletives at me again. I took out my phone from my pocket with the intention to take a photo for a possible report afterwards. But my hand was already shaking and I felt like he would consider this a significant escalation. I do not have enough money for a new phone, and didn’t fancy getting punched. 

So I left it. By the time I reached the junction at the Porte d’Anderlecht I was already trying to stifle tears so I didn’t look like a total freak to my fellow bike commuters. It didn’t work. By the time I’d got home near Simonis was properly convulsing from the delayed shock. The workmen I was supposed to meet for a renovation update must have gotten a shock seeing me kneeling over next to a car wheel trying not to absolutely freak out. Sorry, lads!

I’ve calmed down a little since, and even managed to explain what happened to my wife without bursting into tears again. I’m even now already berating myself for what I could have done differently, how I could react better the next time. Because there will be a next time. 

And this is not okay. It’s not okay that people have to deal with this. Cycling is supposed to be fun - that’s why we do it! It’s hard enough getting through traffic without also having to navigate the bruised egos of small-brained cretins with a Dom Torretto complex.

Incidents like these are unfortunately all too common - most cyclists or pedestrians will I think have seen or heard of one - but they rarely make the news because they, like mine, end without actual violence. But they are not inevitable. They happen for a reason. Three, actually.

Infrastructure, attitude and atmosphere

For all of the recent progress, bike infrastructure in this section - Madou to Bd Roi Albert II - is a catastrophe. It is inconsistent and unintuitive, mixing modes of transport even though there is ample room for segregation. Had there been a segregated bike lane on the park side of the Kruidtuin - like there is on the hospital side - an incident like mine would have been physically impossible, or at the very least improbable. 

It would have meant that active road users - walkers and people cycling - would not be put at the mercy of Brussels’ cadre of aggressive, impatient drivers. Brussels has a bad driver problem. 

There’s the anecdotal evidence – driving through red lights, rampant phone use, fake driving licences, driving without a licence, or driving while suspended by the police. There’s also the statistics – take the example below of a recent speed check. 10% of drivers were breaking the law. I don’t know if Brussels’ political class know the extent to which driver behaviour taken as normal in their city would be considered aberrant at best, and downright dangerous at worst - in other European capitals. 

There’s something about Brussels’ cramped streetscape and the macho attitudes of the men in their matte-paint SUVs and their personalised licence plates that is a combustible cocktail. Take the taxi driver that screamed at me - nearly deliberately hit me - because I dared to make the barest intimation he was being impatient. Always in so much of a hurry to hassle other road users, never in too much of a hurry not to pull and physically intimidate them.

Drivers like the one who confronted me don’t just see cyclists (and pedestrians) as an annoyance or a hindrance, but a provocation - an attitude that’s been fed by a paranoid political tendency hat’s been ascendant in Brussels in recent years. 

It is not politically advantageous to tell a large cohort of your voters they’re bad drivers. It’s easier instead to coddle them with the illusion that there is some coordinated war on drivers, one they are losing, which is directed by dark money. 

What use is there in submitting a formal complaint when the official taxi organisation has defended its drivers breaking the speed limit, police are agnostic about investigating, and politicians paint people who complain about safe streets as “politically motivated”.

In this worldview, people on bikes are either puppets of nefarious interests, or worse, willingly complicit the conspiracy against them (c.f. threads attacking the veracity of bike numbers, or claims that cyclists are paid extras). 

And look, it would be wilful blindness of me to argue that space for cars has not declined in Brussels in recent years. But let’s be real, it’s been a case of tinkering around the edges, not a revolution. Cars dictated how Brussels was for half a century. That’s no longer been the case for maybe a decade, and even then it has been stop-start. But from a position of privilege – cars take up the vast majority of street space and mobility budget – any attempt however meagre to rebalance the scales must feel like oppression.

But for those hard of hearing down the back – THERE IS NO WAR ON CARS. If there is violence in the traffic in Brussels, it is not coming from walkers and people who ride bikes. It’s coming from people like my taxi driver today. Has it gotten worse? It does feel like it has, like certain personality types have taken the recent heated debates around mobility as a licence to do exactly the kind of thing that was done to me today, with impunity. 

And why wouldn’t they: it’s been shown to work, quite effectively in fact. Would the other two men who crossed the street to surround me and harangue me for “abusing” the taxi driver have been as emboldened 5 or 10 years ago to be as aggressive? I’m not sure.

Do I have some degree of sympathy for Brussels taxi drivers? They don’t make it easy on themselves the way members of their profession carry on, but I’m sure it’s not an easy job. Is that an excuse for the kind of threatening behaviour I was subjected to today? What do you think?

I know some people reading this will answer “abso-fucking-lutely”. Put that fucking cyclist back in his fucking ecolo-bobo-cyclo box. The only good cyclist is a dead one - isn’t that what they say over on Facebook? I can already hear the trolls and the other tough guys winding up to decry another “hot-headed” cyclist who got what he deserved. That the rise of cyclists in Brussels is a transient phenomenon, and natural law will reassert itself sooner or later.

That they need only wait for the green parties to lose the election in June and cyclists will melt away as the subsidy tap is turned off. That people will - and I have read this  -trade in their cargo bikes for cabriolets if only the right people are in control.

But it’s nonsense. Brussels’ bike “revolution”, if there is one, has already happened. Since Cvoid the numbers of people riding bikes in Brussels has exploded, every year smashing the records of the previous one. They aren’t going anywhere, even if not everyone has cottoned onto this yet. 

There’s a genre of politician in Brussels who thinks that bike infrastructure is for some nebulous future - the “transport of tomorrow”. But tomorrow’s already here, and if they are serious about protecting their citizens a step change in infrastructure, attitudes, and atmosphere are needed now. 

Yesterday, even. And it starts with acknowledging that incidents like these are not okay. That they are no longer treated as a fait divers. Or waved away with some two-sides nonsense about cyclists also misbehaving. 

People need to stop making allowances for the bullies, for imagining it’s a legitimate political position to say that “our voters don’t ride bikes”, so the rest of you can go whistle. We’re beyond platitudes about “chacun sont choix”. 

I chose to ride my bike today, I didn’t choose to be harassed by an aggressive taxi driver. But maybe something similar will happen to someone else tomorrow, and their choice will be taken away from them out of fear. 

Some people might think cyclists are just a brunch of angry zealots. But that’s just sublimated fear. Because here’s the thing: that taxi driver just wanted to get where he was going marginally faster, and was happy to put me in danger to do it. 

But me, I just wanted to get home in one piece – physically and mentally. Every Brussels cyclist surely has had that thought, getting on their bike in the morning: please let me get where I need to go without incident. Without a close pass. Or an unsighted door. Or an angry driver. 

I wanted to finish this with the line from Network - “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore”. But I’m not mad, not any more. I’m just tired. Enough is enough. 

Trop is te veel.

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Postscript

How do I feel with 12 hours distance from the incident. Not much better to be honest. Do you know what the worst thing is? Watching the reactions come in to my thread yesterday, I felt guilt. Guilt! That I hadn’t done enough, stood up for myself, taken the driver’s details, had a camera on my helmet, made a formal complaint, DONE SOMETHING other than collapse into a nervous wreck. Yesterday was not a good day for me.

Today, I got back on my bike, and I could already feel the timidity creeping into my decision-making, slowing down a little more at junctions, giving cars a wide berth, making myself small again. But at least I got back on my bike.