Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday September 6, 2009

Bike courier not a martyr for a cause

By Jim Taylor

Fatal confrontation
        That’s apparently what happened in Toronto, in a confrontation between bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard and car driver Michael Bryant.
        Police are still sifting through blurry surveillance videos of the incident. But a few facts seem fairly clear.
        Sheppard was in a combative mood. Bryant’s Saab convertible may have blocked, or bumped, Sheppard’s bicycle. Sheppard went to Bryant’s door. Bryant did not get out. Sheppard may have grabbed Bryant’s steering wheel, or even put a headlock on Bryant.
        Bryant drove off with Sheppard clinging to the side of his car. About 100 metres later, Sheppard fell off and got run over. Bryant stopped at a nearby hotel, where police took him into custody. Sheppard was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A different breed
        In this case, my sympathies are with the driver.
        Not because Bryant is a public figure, a former Ontario attorney-general, and generally an important person politically. Rather, because Sheppard worked as a bicycle courier – a group who, in the words of the National Post’s Kelly McPartland, “are to [normal] bicycle commuters as pirates are to weekend boaters.”
        Bicycle couriers are a different breed. Perhaps they have to be, to cope with cars and car drivers. They get paid per delivery. Every wasted second costs them money.
        As a result, in downtown Toronto, you can see couriers riding their bicycles on escalators, careering through lobbies, vaulting curbs, snaking through traffic…
        To quote McPartland again, “They don’t bother much with rules at the best of time; their first approach to conflict is confrontation.”
        It’s not unusual for bicycle couriers to knock down pedestrians or pound their fists on cars delaying their progress.
        A few bicycle couriers I knew personally could revert to nice guys off the job. Sheppard, apparently, could not.
        Edmonton police had 61 warrants issued against him. Sheppard, they warned, had a history of violence, and of addiction to drugs and alcohol.
        Earlier that evening, police had been called to Sheppard’s girlfriend’s apartment to break up a fight. His girlfriend told police he had been drunk.
        Sheppard spent half an hour cooling off in the back of a police cruiser. When police released him, at least one witness thought he was too drunk to ride his bicycle.

Natural reaction
        Early news reports called his confrontation with Michael Bryant an incident of “road rage.” But the rage seems to have been all Sheppard’s. Bryant was simply out with his wife, celebrating their wedding anniversary.
        I know what I would do, if someone who seemed to be a raging maniac leaned into my car and threatened me – let alone physically grabbed me. As an off-the-scale conflict avoider, I would get out of there as quickly as possible.
        Which is just what Bryant did.
        Except that Sheppard didn’t – or couldn’t — let go.
        It was not a hit-and-run accident. Bryant did not try to escape.

Misguided effort
        By supporting Bryant, I’m not excusing car drivers from bad behaviour. Coddled in their metal cocoons, car drivers must make allowance for cyclists’ vulnerability.
        I remember one rainy Toronto night. I was following a cyclist. He had to angle across some street car tracks. Recognizing the potential danger, I slowed down.
        Sure enough, his tires skidded on the rain-slicked rails. He went down with a crash. His face looked up, suddenly terrified, at my headlights looming over him.
        Fortunately, I had already stopped. He picked up his bike and rode on.
        Did Michael Bryant fail to take comparable care when he encountered Darcy Allan Sheppard that night? I don’t know. He may not know himself.
        But I have no doubt that Sheppard’s reaction was irrational and excessive.
        Now his death site has become a shrine. Cards and flowers pile up. Massed cyclists staged disruptive rides through downtown streets, and blocked traffic by laying their bikes down on the pavement.
        Cyclists do need protection. They need bicycle lanes where they don’t have to fear cars and trucks crowding them. In that respect, most European cities are far ahead of our car-obsessed North American metropoli.
        But aggressive couriers like Darcy Allan Sheppard would ignore bike lanes.
        To make Sheppard a martyr for a cause he would have scorned strikes me as both misguided and hypocritical.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



I got only one letter about last week’s column, on the validity of DNA evidence – and that letter was actually intended for someone else! Barb Taft forwarded my column to a friend, with the comment, “Rather scary. Hope I never have to prove who I am.”

All the rest of the mailbag referred back to previous columns. In further response to the column about the U.S. health care debate, Dawne Taylor wondered if I had seen “an article by Jim Wallis (of Sojourners magazine) on Edward Kennedy). http://blog.sojo.net/2009/08/26/honoring-the-greatest-commitment-of-senator-edward-kennedys-life/”

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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