Making sense of the Bryant - Sheppard tragedy

Bryant speaks to reporters.    (Credit: Calabrase/AP) 

Scan the headlines on any given day, and it's easy to see why many parents cringe when they hear that their son (or more rarely daughter) has taken up cycling or become a courier.

There's the occasional cranium meets pavement solo accidents to worry about. And there are the far more common inattentive motorists kills cyclist incidents to fear. And sometimes, in the midst of the daily drumbeat of collisions, which too often ends with somebody's kid in a body bag, something truly bizarre comes around the corner that makes you step back, scratch your head, and wonder: what exactly is it that's wrong with us anyway?

Such a case surfaced earlier this week in Ontario, Canada. Preliminary reporting suggests that something in the province's former District Attorney Michael Bryant snapped in what turned out to be an extraordinarily brutal cyclist-motorist confrontation. As Streetsblog’s Sarah Goodyear points out, the details of the accident are far from clear at this point, and the case is a complicated one, but here’s what reporters have pieced together so far: Somehow an altercation with bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard turned ugly after Bryant struck Sheppard's back tire in a lane that was especially tight due to construction. Sheppard, who was apparently quite drunk at the time, slammed his backpack on the hood and grabbed hold of Bryant’s mirror.

As the two men struggled and cursed at one another, somehow the Harvard-educated Bryant, and the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, decided it made sense to accelerate and then repeatedly ram Sheppard against a tree, a mailbox, and fire hydrant at high speeds in an attempt to literally scrape him off the side of his black Saab.

If Bryant's intent was to bludgeon and kill Sheppard, he certainly succeeded. The bloodied cyclist, who at one point during the confrontation ended up up under the Saab’s back tires, was pronounced dead about an hour after the incident began.

We may never know exactly what transpired between the two men that night. Police are reviewing traffic cameras and high-profile lawyers are already preparing for a court battle. Bryant claims he’s innocent of the charges filed against him, and claims to be eager to tell his side of the story.

Regardless of what the trial reveals, it undoubtedly will pit cyclists against motorists; already, for example, alarmed cyclists in the city have already taken to the streets to protest. And with a high-profile public figure teeing off against a bicycle courier it will be hard to ignore the persistent class tensions that so often simmer just below the surface in such collisions.

We can be fairly sure, however, that whatever caused this particular “traffic tantrum” as author and blogger Tom Vanderbilt call the fogs of rage that afflict so many of us when we get behind a wheel it's not unique to these two men. “In traffic,” Vanderbilt notes, “we [all] struggle to stay human.”

Indeed, as Vanderbilt argues in his book, our entire perspective and way of experiencing the world changes when we’re driving a car. Cocooned in the cockpit of an automobile, we struggle to hear what’s happening beyond our immediate shell, we rarely see a person’s face or make true eye contact, and we lose much of our ability to communicate in any sophisticated way with other road users. 

“The interesting question is not whether some of us are more prone to act like homicidal maniacs once we get behind the wheel of a car but why we all act so differently," Vanderbilt muses. The sense that as drivers we have exclusive rights to the road, that we're anonymous and untouchable when behind the wheel, and that we're completely in control are problems that afflict us all when we drive.

Still, there must be some way that we can change and improve the experience of driving in such a way that we act and communicate more like humans than large metal boxes and in doing so minimize the background stress and irritation that fuels such altercations.

Perhaps someday wireless networks will connect drivers to one another making it possible to share facebook like profiles and communicate more easily with nearby drivers or pedestrians. Or perhaps automobile designers will move away from the use tinted windows and require that automobiles be transparent to enhance the sense that we're driving among people and not inanimate metal objects seemingly incapable of being damaged.

In the meantime, I find that traveling by train, plane, or bus rather than car helps. On these modes of transportation, rather than staring glumly at the bumper of a car, you actually see and can interact with your fellow travelers. And so often you do. You end up patching together people’s stories on the bus, train, or plane in ways that are simply impossible while sitting isolated in a car. And, ultimately, you recognize that these fellow travelers roads are somebody’s kid too--not just the some thing impeding the flow of traffic.

The dehumanizing effects of automobiles and traffic are no excuse or justification for what’s happened in Ontario. Bryant has probably committed murder, and he deserves to suffer the consequences if that's what the courts determine. 

But, ultimately, it's hard to shake the sense that this sort of accident could happen to many more of us than we'd like to believe. And it will happen again and again and again until we develop transportation systems that seek to connect rather than alienate us from one another and respect our humanity rather than constrict it.

More on road rage from the Bicycle Transportation Examiner