You are not wanted here.
Every time I go somewhere on the bike I haven’t been for awhile, a vast swath of forest has been chopped down to make way for yet another neighborhood. The frequency at which these neighborhoods pop up way out in the middle of nowhere reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, where he speaks about the insane pace of new development:
“[Neighborhoods] all have the same layout. When creating a new Burbclave, TMAWH Development Corporation will chop down any mountain ranges and divert the course of any mighty rivers that threaten to interrupt this street plan — ergonomically designed to encourage driving safety. A Deliverator can go into a Mews at Windsor Heights anywhere from Fairbanks to Yaroslavl to the Shenzhen special economic zone and find his way around.”
What does this mean? It means that people will come to fill these new houses, regardless of current financial issues. As long as developers keep building, the people will keep coming. The population of James City County has tripled in size in the past 30 years. Places that were once lonely two lane roads have been widened to four lanes with 15 traffic lights within a one mile stretch. It is clear that the urban planners around here graduated at the bottom of their class. From here, it will only get worse, with more large tracts of farmland rezoned as commercial, ready for the razing. The locals are up in arms, but like most municipalities, the ones here turn a blind eye to the natives and only see tax revenue from more people and businesses.
The people are coming. Where do they come from? Certainly the current residents don’t just shuffle around to the new houses, and there aren’t that many foreign immigrants. Instead, the new residents are pouring in from the Northeast. In Colonial Williamsburg, nearly every car is fixed with a New Jersey, New York, or Pennsylvania license plate. They come here as tourists. They come here as students. They get a taste and then they move here. They move here and they bring their jackass Northeast attitudes with them.
Those who have lived in Williamsburg most of their lives are decent people. They drive older, well maintained cars and give me plenty of room out on the backroads. The Northeast transplants infect this place like a plague, driving hulking Suburbans and dragging around trailers with 30 foot boats. Accelerating from a light last week, one came up on me with the side mirror just inches from my face. With an extra wide, monolithic boat in tow, I knew I would be a red smear on the boat if the guy continued to pass me. After giving him a hard look through the window and screaming at him to get into the passing lane, I narrowly averted disaster. Today I was nearly creamed again by a minivan that was close enough where I could reach through the window and shake some sense into the passenger in the front seat. Later on, out in the middle of nowhere with no other cars around, some guy in one of those massive luxury pickups laid on the horn and tried to get me to move into the dirt. There was nobody out there but me and the truck, with the road nearly three lanes wide, yet these people have to prove they are better than me since they are driving a car. My old teammate, Adam, was run off the road last week by yet another jerk. He crashed and is in a sling for two weeks. Despite gobs of other cyclists out, those who come here from the nasty Northeast just don’t care.
I remember my first experience with this attitude when I stayed with one of my teammates in Rhode Island for a race in Boston. We were out running on the sidewalk near his house on the day before the meet. We got to an intersection and started to cross when someone made a turn right into us. We were paint on the car. After yelling at the guy, my teammate told me not to do that, since “they’ll pull a gun on you up here.”
These Northeast transplants are why Virginia Beach is so bad for cyclists. Everyone that lives there is not from the area; they are in the military or were in the military and they all come from the places that start with “new.” New Jersey. New York. New England. They really need a “new” attitude, especially as they start to move to once quiet places like Williamsburg.
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