How to piss off pedestrians
In The Clan of the Couriers, I discovered how much stupidity bicycle messengers carry around with them.
Or perhaps you are not someone with so loud a voice or so wide an audience. Perhaps you are simply someone who has been frightened by a zooming messenger while walking around downtown, or cut off by a messenger while driving, or flipped off by a messenger, or worse. Perhaps you are a pedestrian who has wound up flat on the sidewalk, staring at a haze of bike shoes and piercings and attitude after being hit by a messenger (this does happen, though no firm statistics exist on how often).
Yes, I'm one who was used as a human traffic cone. I think the messenger may have actually brushed me as he sped by, illegally, at high speed (at least 15 mph, compared to my 4mph walking speed). Oh, and he did it from behind. I eventually started walking on the other side of the block from the messenger service's storefront.
Bicycle messengers should be arrested and prosecuted for riding on the sidewalk. They are subject to the same laws everyone else is.
And they have no one to blame but themselves for having to worry about "lawless drivers" - if they obeyed the traffic laws consistently, they would set a very good, and very right, example for other cyclists, and all motorists.
I have no sympathy for their self-made plight.