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In February 2024, 479 women and non-binary people answered a BikeLoud survey about biking in Portland. This is how they answered one of the open-ended questions.Please describe the worst - or most common - incident of abuse or aggressive behaviors towards you while cycling, including any terms of abuse.
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329 women / non-binary answered this question. Here's the impact.Level of Trauma definitionsexamples
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Level 1 Trauma. 29 womenHit and run. Run off road. Throwing projectiles while close passing. Hitting. Dog attacks. Deliberate close pass while kids are on their bikes. Very aggressive stalkingMost common is aggressive and too close driving. Worst was when I got hit by a hit and run driver and the nearby pedestrian told me I deserved it for riding a bike.
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Level 2 Trauma. 53 womenDeliberate close pass. Combo tailgating, revving, and close pass. Stalking. Deliberate targeting. Tapping. Projectiles.Driving towards me or extremely close to me to scare or intimidate me; Honking and yelling while driving to startle me; Yelling sexist or explicit obscenities at me; Speeding past me to get in front of me then slowing down and not allowing me to pass;
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Level 3 Trauma. 229 womenClose pass, yelling, swearing, honking, hunting, catcalling, rolling coal, spittinga car or truck that passes me too close with what seems like purposeful acceleration meant to be aggressive and intimidating, often with a honk or extra loud engine noise. I have been yelled at but I don’t recall actual terms used. It’s so mean. It’s really upsetting.
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10 women did not give enough info to assess or responded to say they didn't like the question
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ACTORS. What or who is responsible for the worst incident you experienced?examples
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289 women said people driving, 25 said unhoused people,16 said other people biking, 4 pedestrians, 5 focused on infrastructure and bike theft (some said multiple actors). 5 questioned the need for the survey.
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281 women talked about "deliberate" acts toward women on bikes.A man screaming "get the f*ck off the road" repeatedly while I was cycling on a low traffic route downtown, revving their engine constantly and pulling up too close behind me. I finally got off the road, shaking and crying and called 911. The dispatcher told me there was "nothing we can do, it's not illegal." She didn't want me to report the behavior, even though I had the license plate.
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32 wrote about acts done "cluelessly" by people driving.
I have had multiple cars/trucks try to back into me when we were at a stop sign/traffic signal/railway crossing because they wanted to turn or leave. I make sure I am positioned so drivers can see me when I come to a stop behind them but I've found that they often do not check for me before reversing. I've had two occasions where the car nearly backed into me (I came very close to being hit both times because they were backing up very quickly and actually fell off my bike the second time because of how quickly I had to move to get away) and had the drivers scream at me both times and blame me for their actions.
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WHERE: 19 called out riding on a protected bike lane or greenway
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Some people described a specific neighborhood or street. Many of the incidents focused on unhoused people were on multiuse trails.
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PEOPLE USED THEIR CAR FUNCTIONS AS WEAPONS AGAINST WOMEN ON BIKESexample
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53 used cars deliberately as weapons aimed at women biking
I was riding slowly, and legally, in a crosswalk. The person drove straight at me, looking directly at me, and swerved at the last minute. I started shaking and crying. The anger and hatred in the person's face was frightening. This is just one of of several intensly frightening interactions in 30+ years of cycling where I was targeted by someone driving. Despite this I love riding my bike for daily transportation.
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39 women cited honking horns excessively
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13 gunning engines
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5 rolling coal
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PEOPLE USED THE POWER OF THEIR MOVING CARS TO INTIMIDATE WOMEN ON BIKESexample
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103 close passesMost often it's drivers passing way too close or tailgating when I can't get out of the way. Sometimes it's yelling at me as they go by, honking to scare me, or one time someone threw an empty drink cup out the window at me. The close passes are the scariest I think, particularly when they're paired with someone yelling. It then becomes a physical threat and a verbal one and I worry that they aren't paying close enough attention to their driving because they're too wrapped up in yelling. I've been biking in Portland for over a decade and those have by far been the worst.
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54 excess speed
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32 close tailgating
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21 cutting off a person on a bike to force a stop
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19 deliberately drove in the bike lane
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PEOPLE (car drivers & others) TOOK DELIBERATE PHYSICAL ACTIONS AGAINST WOMEN ON BIKESexample
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29 stalking (following for multiple blocks, sometimes following women on bikes to their home or business)
I had a driver stop to tell me that I needed a rear bike light so they could see me. I didn’t respond so the continued to verbally harass me. When the light changed they followed me and kept trying to yell at me. Eventually I came to park and biked into it so they couldn’t follow me. I was scared to bike for a while after that.
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15 touching, bumping or spitting
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14 bottles thrown
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8 guns
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2 dog bites
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Hunting. this is a troubling category coming up a fair bit. Cars full of young men chasing women on bikes. I'm still figuring out how to assess
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155 DELIBERATE VERBAL ATTACKSexample
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54 excessive swearingA woman yelling out her (passenger) side window “hit the bitch” after I pointed to the stop sign that they were rolling through when I had right of way.
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36 yelling unintelligable
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27 very specific threats about being female
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24 called bitch or cunt
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19 incidents with children
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11 sexual threats
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9 mansplaining
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3 specific about disablities
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2 on phone/distracted, I think we've become so inured to texting while driving that people don't even mention it anymore
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UNHOUSED PEOPLE were cited by 7.6% of survey respondents (n=25)Many women say they will not ride Esplanade, Springwater, 205, Columbia Waterfront or other multiuse trailsexample
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Level 1, 3 incidentsAssault and bike theft. Dog bite. Threatened with knifeHomeless campers, drug addicts living / hanging out on and around multi use paths and bike lanes have made it too unsafe for me to bike. Most of my favorite bikes routes have been taken over my homeless encampments and it is no longer safe for me to bike.
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Level 2, 2 incidentsExposed genitals. Threw a bottle.
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Level 3, 20 incidentsMajority listed swearing, yelling, screaming or general "I feel threatened".
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After he physically threatened me with his car, and after honking, I was told by a man, "I'm going to kill you the next time I see you" while I was biking--legally--on a typically busy (but not at all busy right then) 3 or 4-lane one-way road that has no cycling-specific infrastructure and doesn't see much bike traffic, but which was at the time a crucial connector that I needed to be on to get across a freeway without going extremely far out of my way twice; literally I was on this stretch for the equivalent of a couple blocks to get across a freeway, not riding on a busy arterial for miles. It was nighttime and I had very bright lights on my bike and was all the way over to the right. He didn't yell it. He said it slowly, deliberately. I'll never forget it. It wasn't inflamed reactive rage; it was a slow, methodical, simmering threat. He looked right at me. I can still hear it many years later: I'm going to kill you.

I've had men in SUVs and trucks deliberately swerve into me, almost, but not quite, hitting me more times than I can count. This is a cross-Oregon problem, in urban, suburban, ex-urban, and rural areas, all of which I've biked in extensively. I've been called a dumb c---, a stupid b----, and other misogynist slurs, again, more times than I can count. I've also--interestingly--been treated to yelling misogyny from male street joggers, who run in the street against traffic all the way to the side of the road, right where cyclists typically are, on known, signed bike routes, despite the presence of sidewalks and adjacent alternant routes that would be the same for them since they don't need the benefit of stop sign adjustment. This is weirdly common in Portland, and they are often very rhetorically and even physically aggressive. I've also been in collisions with street joggers, and their dogs, and I, the cyclist, have always been the more injured person, so it's a real problem actually. I've encountered groups of 3 men jogging with 2 or 3 huge dogs who are taking up literally the entire street and are very aggressive when confronted with a cyclist--me, one woman--trying to get to work.

Once I was biking to work in Portland with a male cyclist who was behind me, and a truck deliberately swerved into me at a high rate of speed to threaten me or worse, and the man who was biking behind me chased the driver down and yelled at him because he saw it all happen in a way I did not have the vantage to and he was pissed. The truck driver was likely annoyed by my male companion, who he encountered first, but didn't do anything. Then when he encountered me, he became enraged and deliberately tried to intimidate me by swerving into me. If anything had "gone wrong," I'd probably be dead now, due to the speed of the driver. Still have a pretty visceral reaction to light blue Leer-brand pick-up truck toppers to this day because of this decades-ago incident.

None of these described incidents are rare, aberrant, unusual, or even, really, worthy of note anymore, but they're the specific ones that come immediately to mind with no thought at all, but that are representative of a whole problem. They happen ALL THE TIME, for seemingly no reason often. The misogyny comes out almost immediately, reflexively. I feel that if a female cyclist doesn't preemptively display deference to motorists--of any sex, but especially male--they will be targeted, and if we're assertive, then all the more so. But cyclists need to be assertive to be safe. Male cyclists too often seem like they're not our allies (aside form the aforementioned male cyclist--this was actually a rare instance in my experience). The dismissive 'male glance' is real, on the bike as in all of life. I can distinctly recall men realizing another cyclist (me, almost 50) is behind them, at a red light or whatever, and looking back, only to discover a woman who is older than he is, on a not-interesting-to-him bike, with no interesting blingy gear on it, and have him turn away, barely able to acknowledge I was there at all. What was he expecting to see? A sexualizable object young enough to be worthy of his attention? Men are far more sexist than they can admit. As many jobs become more gender-integrated, men find new ways to assert their male supremacy. There seems to me to be a distinct strain of "biking everywhere with no infrastructure makes me a man" in the Portland bike ecosystem and it's detrimental to a lot of folks, not just cis-gendered adult women.

We live in a deeply sexist society and misogynist backlash to feminist gains is observantly real across both dominant culture and most if not all subcultures. Women already experience this whether they have the interpretive lens to see it or not. Many women I know just don't want to be extra-burdened by the physical and emotional danger of biking routinely for transportation, because they're already burdened enough in a way men just aren't.
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