From Outside magazine and that guy who wrote that book about traffic comes maybe the first good article I've ever read about hostility between cyclists and drivers on the roads. It's a pretty long article (I actually found it via the apt twitter feed @longreads) but it's Presidents' Day, so what the hell else are you doing?

Not every piece of the article is spot-on ("riding a bike has become a little like entering a war zone"? Uh... it's actually pretty mellow and fun, most of the time) but author Tom Vanderbilt does a great job of objectively explaining why people become such haters on the road:

In one sense, the so-called bikelash has little to do with transportation modes. In the late 1960s, a pair of British psychologists set out to understand the ways in which we humans tend to split ourselves into opposing factions. They divided a group of teenage schoolboys, who all knew each other, into two groups and asked them to perform a number of "trivial tasks." The boys were then asked to give money to fellow subjects, who were anonymous save for their group affiliation. As it turned out, the schoolboys consistently gave more money to members of their own group, even though these groups had just formed and were essentially meaningless. ...

This dynamic appears on the road in all kinds of ways. "All the time, you hear drivers saying things like 'Cyclists, they're all running red lights, they're all riding on sidewalks,' while completely overlooking the fact that the group they identify with regularly engages in a whole host of negative behaviors as well." ...

And so it is with cyclists. In a country like the Netherlands, which has more bikes than people and where virtually the entire population cycles at one time or another, the word cyclist isn't meaningful. But in the U.S., the term often implies something more, in both a good and a bad sense.