Nothing Sharper

I’ve been debating whether or not to post the following. On the one hand, it shows that cops will yield to a calm demeanor and strong knowledge of the vehicle code. On the other, it shows that they don’t always know the law they’re asked to enforce. Complicating the decision was the officer’s identity – it seems fair to praise an officer for coming around to reason, but it doesn’t seem fair to harangue an officer for not knowing a frequently misunderstood section of law. So, I’ve tried to make reasonable compromises without sacrificing accuracy.

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At around 7:00 PM on February 15th, Morgan and I were riding up 16th Street on our way home from meditation, two-by-two in the rightmost lane, I on the left side of the lane, she on the right, edging the door zone. After crossing P Street, the car behind us honked its horn. Trying not to interrupt our conversation, I reached my hand behind me, flipped the bird, and continued on. The driver responded by turning on his car’s flashing lights and siren. I looked back, sighed, and Morgan and I dutifully pulled into the space between two parked cars in front of Uncle Vito’s Pizza and laid our bikes on the parkway. The police officer stopped his car on 16th, blocking the right lane and incidentally knocking against the driver’s side mirror on a parked BMW.

The officer asked for my license and then asked (rightfully so) to see that my bike had lights, and I flicked the switch to show him. Then he asked why I thought he pulled me over. I said I didn’t know. He said we weren’t riding in the bike lane. I responded with by pointing out that 16th Street has no bike lanes. The officer then said we weren’t riding single file.

Now, I talk a big game about confrontation, but I tend to understand that when it comes down to actual policy, that tends to get implemented at an individual level. It’s okay to think the Sacramento Police Department are a bunch of thick-headed ex-jocks high on their own authority (thankfully false) or that AT&T is Satan’s younger, eviler, less-competent brother (entirely true), but it’s not fair to the underpaid tech support person or the overstressed officer to hold them accountable for the failures of their employers, even when it would be really cathartic to do so.

So, when the officer said we weren’t riding single file, I didn’t lambaste him. I doubt it was his fault that the Sacramento Police Department didn’t properly train its officers as to the actual rules of the road, and bike law is one of those things that has only recently become important. Instead, I tried, as calmly as I could, to let him know just what the Vehicle Code says about bike riding on a street like 16th: that if it’s not practicable for a bicyclist to share a lane with a car, they don’t share the lane. “Single file” appears nowhere in the law.

I didn’t try to “pull rank” on him, either. As he and I talked, I thought about telling him that as a member of the Board of Directors of the Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates, as a Core member of the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen, and as the guy who helped restart Sacramento Critical Mass and helped it keep its nose too clean for the cops to bother with, I might be more than passingly familiar with section 21200 of the California Vehicle Code. But I didn’t think that would help; the officer needed to know that pulling over cyclists riding two abreast on some streets are doing nothing wrong, not that he’ll get nowhere pulling over a specific well-connected cyclist.

When it became clear that there was no traffic infraction we could be cited for, the officer changed his stance a bit, asking whether my flipping him off was appropriate. I responded that in context, it was appropriate, even if it wasn’t smart. In that sense, he had caught me. Yes, it exacerbates road rage. Yes, it gives cyclists a bad name. Yes, it might push someone “over the edge". But what could we do? We can’t safely ride 16th without “blocking” a lane from a driver’s perspective anyway, and nothing short of getting off of the road entirely would satisfy a driver with that mindset. Also: they’re my roads, too, and the CVC has my back.

After about ten minutes of this, The officer then walked behind his cruiser and held a cell phone conversation that sounded from his side like one you would have with your rebellious teenage daughter. He then came back, returned my license, and told us that he had better things to do than waste time writing me a citation. By this time, he seemed to understand what Morgan had been trying to point out when she wasn’t backing me on the legality of our lane placement and him on the stupidity of flipping off drivers: all of this started when he honked at me. My act of casual road aggression was a response to his.

In the end, I thanked him for listening to us, and we all agreed that it was dumb to flip off drivers, especially if I don’t know how close they are to the metaphorical edge. I asked Sergeant Chapman his name, we shook hands, and then Morgan and I rode home without further incident.

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Incidentally, in retelling this story, the most shocking element seems to be that I flipped off a cop. I can say that I didn’t know that it was an officer when I flipped him off, but even so, giving an officer the middle finger is considered Constitutionally protected speech. Had Sgt. Chapman cited me, I could quite easily have walked in an ACLU office and put another $50,000 crater in the city of Sacramento’s budget, especially here in the Ninth Circuit, where decisions like this are precedent.