“It was the night before” the last day of New Jersey Governor Murphy’s last day in office, and the emails are stirring. S4834 sits somewhere in the dark, humming quietly. People pretend they’re waiting on the governor when really, they are waiting on themselves.

When Murphy signs S4834—and I predict he will, because I didn’t fall off a truck from turnip country, hopefully advocacy in New Jersey, New York, and across the nation finally have a come-to-Jesus pause. 

We did not arrive here through confusion.

Confusion would be too generous a description.

We are here through willed complacency and convenience.

Bicycle businesses are still businesses, and their business lobby told a simple lie, that mopeds were bicycles, that throttles were pedals, and everyone who stood to profit, financially or socially, just said, “OK.” A taxonomy collapsed. Money moved. The public saw the seams, and when they did, they stopped trusting the garment.

People do not like being handled.

They do not like being told they did not see what they saw. The king looks pretty naked.

People do not like “actually” when they are telling an anecdote of almost being harmed.

Meanwhile, advocates kept insisting distinctions mattered, Class One, Class Two, Class Three, while someone on a 28‑mph machine skims past a stroller, scares the hell out of a bird watcher, or a 12-year-old ends up in the emergency room.

“We got him the bike for Xmas.”

“We should have sent him to bike lessons.”

“It’s all our fault.”

PeopleForBikes said it was a bike. Local advocates echoed it. And suddenly the word “bike” became as elastic and unreliable as any political slogan.

Class Three is too fast.

A throttle is not a pedal.

This should not require a dissertation or a PHD to understand, yet it does.

Then there are the lawyers. Always the lawyers. Their presence is framed as “support,” but my deductive reasoning leads me to doubt that.  

Infrastructure offers no payout. PIP offers no payout. Litigation, however, pays handsomely. 

“The 100 lawyers sponsoring LAB, that’s because bicyclists really need help!”

Owing to these lawyers, we get the moral theater of “driver accountability” in place of protected lanes or design changes. We don’t get to discuss anything that might reduce the number of clients.

“That’s awfully cynical, Lo.”

Just because it’s cynical doesn’t mean it's not true. Look at US infrastructure compared to anywhere, and this is what we achieved with every personal injury lawyer in the US financially donating to our bicycle advocacy groups. 

Infrastructure is slow, methodical, measurable.

Litigation is quick, lucrative, and clickable theater, like porn. It is instant gratification. 

Then there is what I’m doing, urban criticism. The kind of criticism that speaks to systems, shared risk, and behavioral incentives? It gets a bunch of finger-waving. And accusations of “being negative.” Awards, grants, and party invites to Tower Research Capital holiday party go to the chest-thumping cadence of advocacy solution copy—SAFE SAFE SAFE, typed like an incantation, a branding exercise dressed as urgency. It’s S&M for the wealthy male in spandex. Is Class 3 the safe word?

And Forester rises from the dead, whispering “TAKE THE LANE my child,” as if bravado and morality could compensate for a protected bike lane. As if nerve were a transportation plan.

This is what happens when advocacy becomes enamored with adjacency to power.

People are clearly mistaking proximity for influence.

Advocacy has become something kept and bought rather than catalytic. Then there are the purists, the Old Testament cyclists who still condemn e-bikes as a moral lapse, policing without ever offering solidarity beyond their own narrow view with a side of ableism. Alongside them are the libertarians, whose weltanschauung smooths every gradient until reality disappears, insisting that scale does not matter. Insisting that two tons at highway speed is equivalent to 80 pounds at 28 mph. This flattening of truth is so complete that it detaches entirely from the physical world.

If this bill were the existential threat some claim, where were the people who were supposed to sound alarms?

Where were the op-eds?

Where were the statements that reached beyond the choir?

I guess we don’t do journalism anymore. We do PR for lawyers, private equity, and development. 

Maybe they’re negotiating in private rooms.

Maybe they aren’t.

Maybe cynicism is simply clarity spoken aloud.

Either way, the bill will be signed or left to die. 

The administration will turn off the lights. And the bike community, fragmented, self-satisfied, blinking in the dark, will have to decide whether it finally wants to wake up.

A reckoning is coming, signature or no signature.