In the last few years, the word representation has taken a new meaning in the popular parlance. The first clause of that sentence is important. People of historically marginalized groups have talked about not being represented in popular media for a long, long time, but I haven’t really seen that enter into the vocabulary of the mainstream until recently. Here’s a bicyclist’s brief meditation on that.

I’ll be honest: prior to this adventure I could only take people at their word when they say representation matters. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t have to, because people like me are represented in every medium, government office, and social institution I can think of. Even when I’ve lived in places where that’s not true—Japan, for example—it still didn’t matter to me, because it didn’t need to. I could always just go back where I came from. So it’s pretty easy for guys like me to assume it doesn’t matter to anyone—i.e., that other people are making a mountain out of a molehill— which is why my default position has been to just assume people are telling the truth when they say it really does matter, even though I couldn’t see how it matters myself.

But then I was riding along and I saw this sign:

In Australia and New Zealand, legally you’ve got to give me 1.5 meters between my bike and your car. This sign doesn’t show anything like that. It shows a car passing me in a way that threatens my life. And it does that through poor representation. It leaves out something the driver thinks of as pretty lightweight and the bicyclist thinks of as a clear and present danger: the side mirror.

That’s arguably the part that matters most: the one that comes closest to hitting me every day. (And when I’m on the road, it is every day.) The sign shows 1.5 meters between the center of my tire and the center of the car tire, but what I need is 1.5 meters between my handlebar and your mirror. So let’s see what that would look like.

Booster’s handlebars are about a meter wide. That’s the green line. The yellow line, then, is 1.5 meters. (Or as close as I could get, anyway. My photoshopping is one step above fingerpaint.) So as far as representation goes, 1.5 meters is about the distance from my hand to the car stereo. My distance to the deadly side mirror is only a few centimeters. So the representation I get in the sign tells drivers their recklessness is perfectly fine.

I did find one sign where my representation is even worse. This one says bicyclists are actually invisible.

What I really need all these signs to say is, To pass me safely at least half of your car needs to be in the neighboring lane. That’s 1.5 meters, measured in terms you can actually see, not just envision abstractly. The existing Share The Road signs really say this:

To this the non-bicyclist can say just what I’ve been thinking all these years: okay, I’ll take it on faith that this really matters to you, but to me it feels like you’re blowing things out of proportion. After all, the roadsides aren’t littered with bike-entangled corpses. And okay, fine, there’s a kernel of truth to that. However:

Bicycle touring is awesome, and lots of people won’t do it specifically because of inattentive drivers.

Mountain biking without knowing what you’re doing is objectively less dangerous than riding where cars are. That is fucking crazy.

And most importantly:

I had to develop a whole catalogue of defensive riding strategies to prevent you from killing me when you’re behind the wheel.

Now, lest we mistake this post for a straight white able-bodied man complaining about how he’s not represented well, I’ll remind you these road signs were the dope slap I needed to see the true nature of the problem. One of my Top Ten Favorite Comics, Sam Jay, said she didn’t know she was gay because there were no gay Black women for her to see growing up. (Skip ahead to 3:00 for that specific bit.) The road signs were all wrong. LGBTQ teens are at significantly greater risk of suicide because the road signs are all wrong, stigmatizing gay kids and normalizing their maltreatment. And the list goes on.

Don’t listen to me on this stuff. Listen to Sam. I’m only writing this because sometimes in life you need to own your shit. I think a lot of guys like me understand that gay people know how to “act straight” and people of color know how to “talk white” because those defensive strategies can be life-savers. But the connection between bad signage (poor representation) and road accidents (serious harm) isn’t necessarily as clear. Not to me, anyway, not until now.

Philosofiction

#TBT: Representation Matters