• Chandler West/Sun-Times Media
  • A bike lane—John Kass’s unhappy place.

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to make something go away is to ignore it. But rules usually have exceptions, this one included. For instance, you can’t ignore away cancer, disfiguring goiters, bleeding hemorrhoids—or, it would seem, John Kass. The Tribune columnist has made a hobby and cottage industry of engendering contempt for Chicago cyclists or, as he calls them, “the Little Bike People.”

Woof. Where to start. How about the “salmon-colored pants” he sees everyone riding around in. Maybe on a tandem bike on Nantucket, bud. And really: Unconstitutional? This premise is so tenuous he doesn’t even attempt to make a case for it—he just tosses it like a grenade and inches slowly out of the room. Also, and maybe this is nitpicky, but it’s very strange to call something “so-called” when you’re the only one who’s calling it that.

. . .

Now, bicyclists aren’t required to have papers, or even a bicyclist license. And the cops don’t make a practice of chasing those who ride their bikes through red lights, something you see almost every day. But you need to carry papers if you’re walking a dog on the same street?

That seems almost, what’s the word, unconstitutional?

At the risk of giving Kass too much credit, the vitriol he sows is actually harmful. A bike is a legitimate form of transportation, and encouraging drivers to dismiss cyclists as nuisances, rather than people traveling to work or school or the grocery store, is dangerous. His own publication reported in October that Illinois is fifth in the nation for cycling deaths, based on numbers from 2012, but since then it’s likely pulled ahead. According to Chicago Streets Blog, there have been eight cyclist deaths in Chicago in 2014, twice as many as there were in 2013. Not to mention injuries. (To put it into perspective, there were seven bike deaths in 2011 and 1,300 injuries.) But numbers aren’t as compelling as stories, which put a face on the dirty bearded hipster “Little Bike People” Kass so despises. How ’bout this story about how 26-year-old Bobby Cann was killed by a careless, intoxicated driver on Clybourn in 2013?