LETTERS: CYCLIST: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

To the editor:

To establish my credentials, I am a 55-year-old bicyclist who has never owned an automobile nor had an automobile operator's license. Kelle Lane, addressing a sort of open letter to bicyclists, purports to be concerned over the dangerous situation in which bicyclists find themselves while the traverse the Mississippi River Trail. She obviously feels that bicycles and motor vehicles should not use the same thoroughfares. I suggest that her argument should be directed at legislators and traffic engineers instead of bicyclists. In my decades of bicycling, I have never hesitated to mix with motorized traffic, and I have never resorted to devices such as the "Boston left" where the cyclist dismounts and walks through the berm in order to avoid riding in the left lane.

I have had four accidents involving cars. In three of them, the police determined that the fault lay with the motorist and issued citations to that effect. This would most likely have been the outcome in the fourth case, if the lady had stuck around to let the gendarmerie sort out that one too. The most serious of these occurred when I was tooling along on Illinois Route 3 going from St. Louis to rendezvous with my boat, which was undergoing a refit in Hartford, Ill. The driver claimed that her pooch, which had steadfastly resisted doing so all the way from Ohio, jumped on her lap just as she overtook me. Those unpredictable dogs will be the death of me yet. Of the other three, two cut me off in order to make right turns, and the other, while we were waiting for a green light, allowed her car to drift into my rear wheel, damaging it.

Lane referred to the bicycles as "death machines." Is that, by any chance, because people are sometimes killed on bicycles? If that is the case, then how should we refer to automobiles, in which far greater numbers of people are killed? Furthermore, cars kill thousands and thousands of people who, at the time, are not even in cars. Can Lane claim a similar thing about bicycles?

Lane seems to have a conception of bicyclists as people who only mount their velocipedes in order to have a good time. While it may very well be true that that is the primary reason some do, the same can be said of NASCAR enthusiasts, drag racers, Sunday drivers and cruising teen-agers -- motorists all. The fact that a bicycle is fun to be on in no way detracts from its legitimacy. She suggests license plates and vehicle taxes. Fine. I'll be glad to do my part -- so long as the fees charged are commensurate with the costs involved in bicycle use of the public ways. Using that as a meterstick, it won't be much, I can tell her.

Lane's letter appears, in spite of the concern she professes, to bristle with hatred of bicyclists. Why else would she end her letter: "Here's to chat-filled roads, dogs off leashes and maybe a good, old-fashioned 18-wheel how-do-you do"? If this actually reflects Lane's mindset, I would fear a chance meeting with her in any setting at all.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.