It irks me when a writer uses hyperbole to make a point.
Then I just want to cry, rend my jersey from my body and roar to the heavens like The Hulk midway through transformation.
OK, maybe not that much.
But I was irked by Scott Tracey of the Guelph Mercury with this week's Jury of One, his published column in the newspaper.
Tracey is writing about cyclists and traffic laws, and how cyclists need to respect the Highway Traffic Act. I agree with him, until he writes: "on any given day, I see dozens of cyclists, knowingly or otherwise, simply breaking the law."
Wow. On any given day? That means any day, and every day. So, daily, Tracey sees dozens of cyclists breaking the law. Let's say that while one might assume that by dozens, he means many dozen, that in this case, he is referring to the minimum for "dozens," which would be 24 cyclists.
Where is he seeing 24 cyclists daily breaking the law? In Guelph? Does he sit on his porch with a clicker near a four-way stop? There's a four-way stop in front of my daughter and son-in-law's place in Toronto. I'm sure there are more than a dozen an hour who blow through the stop sign, or at least hesitate. (A roughly equal number slow to a near-stop or stop completely.)
Is it on his cycle commute to work? If you travel at rush hour, I'm sure you would see dozens of cyclists. (I travel at off-peak times, and if I did see a dozen riders in the space of my 30-minute commute, I'd be amazed.) And of those dozens of cyclists that he saw, was every single one of them breaking the law? And how were they doing that?
Perhaps they were all riding on the sidewalk. Of course, that's a local municipal bylaw offence, and not "breaking the law" in the context of the Criminal Code (national law) or the Highway Traffic Act (provincial law).
Perhaps none of them had a bell. That's breaking the Highway Traffic Act. There's an offence worth writing a column about. Or was he talking about visible roadway behaviour: running stop lights, failing to signal a turn, riding through a crosswalk?
Did Tracey see dozens of cyclists breaking the law on any given day? Well, my guess is that he conflated events. Couple of incidents on Monday, maybe a few hotdog cyclists on Tuesday, someone who didn't signal on Wednesday, and by the end of the week, why, there were "dozens" of these idiots on the road.
And with that evidence, he used his Jury of One column to throw the onus for roadway safety where it belongs -- not on the motorists who cause the majority of roadway fatalities and injuries, not on the careless drivers who have made the auto insurance industry into a wallet-draining megalith -- but on the "dozens" of cyclists who daily break the law and merely tick off the people who witness it.
Thankfully, cases of law-breaking are decided by a jury of 12, and not a Jury of One.