A matter of life and death: Human rights and riding a bike to work

After more than a year of biking to work—a six-kilometer ride, one-way—I’ve had more than enough near-collisions that, however, have not deterred me from saying that I’ll be commuting by bike for the rest of my life. For the right reasons, too: Using a bike as my primary mode of transportation is aligned with my line of work with the Human Rights and People Empowerment Center (HRPEC). Established in 2017, the nongovernment organization holds discussions, mostly with young people, on human rights and the many ways that we, as a society, are committed to promoting them. We also hold regular film showings and performances every Wednesday night, where directors, producers, artists, actors, and resource persons share the processes and disciplines involved in their work and discuss them from a human rights perspective. Needless to say, the parallels between human rights work and advocating for active mobility hardly escape me. What’s readily apparent is that we have a constitutionally guaranteed right to travel, a recognition of our human need to go from point A to point B.

Over time, it became clear to me that riding a bike to work involves other rights, especially when the use of road spaces becomes a matter of life and death for bikers more than it is for car users. Paradigms shift once a bike rider encounters car owners who justify their entitlement, dominance, and density on the road with their payment of the road tax. It’s a fiction that exists only in car registration fees that hardly contribute to the budget spent on the construction and maintenance of our roads.

According to the Social Weather Stations, as of 2022, only 6 percent of the population owns cars. How can this 6 percent think that they’ve purchased the right to supersede the rights of others in using our roads? Does this small segment also believe they’re entitled to inflict some ills on the rest of road users, such as clogged streets and roads due to illegal parking, clunky vehicles that break down and result in horrible traffic, and air pollution from ill-maintained cars?

A 2019 report by the Philippine Statistics Authority also found that cars have an average of only 1.7 riders, not too far from the 1.2 ridership average of motorcycles. Cars, too, occupy a much bigger space on the road than bikes, whose acquisition and maintenance cost only a fraction of that of cars. If we’re talking about fairness, one must ask why cars get so much road space and why bikers are always put on the defensive when using the road alongside them. Granted that being fast and heavy, cars are intrinsically dangerous to bikers, shouldn’t a car driver’s first concern be to keep others safe?

The move to create bike lanes is one rare instance when the government thought of the smaller folk while appeasing the minority who can afford cars. In many ways, there is a sense of justice in owning and using a bike rather than getting into debt to own and drive a car in this climate, when prices of vegetables are skyrocketing, when gasoline is gold, and when ice caps are melting.

In HRPEC, we have remained vigilant of our rights, starting with the drug-related extrajudicial killings under the Duterte administration. At the core of these killings is the belief that our rights are negotiable—not inherent, not inalienable—and that people can trade their rights or lose them altogether with the choices they make. Every day, I am reminded that such loss starts with small choices. I ride a bike to work and have had near misses with some cars, whose drivers think I don’t deserve to move in the same space, and who think that I willfully defy traffic rules and risk my life just because I ride a mere 13-kilogram steel bicycle.

DLS Pineda,

University of the Philippines Diliman