Today’s Opinion comes to us from proud biker and DCist’s tech guru, Tom Lee.

You’ve probably never met me, but odds are that you have a grudge against me anyway. It’s not that I’m a particularly objectionable guy. I’m generally pretty friendly, and if you and I were to run into each other I’m sure we could make some pleasant smalltalk about music or movies or the Redskins. But eventually my horrible secret would be revealed: you’d figure out that I’m a bicyclist. And if you’re like most people, that’s when your eyes would narrow.

It took me a while to understand that this was the order of things. I had always assumed that biking around in my helmet and reflective ankle strap made me an object of derision and/or pity — not hatred. I’ve only recently realized that bike riders are on every city-dweller’s list of pet peeves. They shouldn’t be.

It rarely fails: mention biking in the city and folks will either complain about cyclists riding on the sidewalk, cyclists running red lights or both. My favorite example occurred in a recent DCist comment thread: presented with news of a bicyclist being assaulted and robbed, a commenter noted that the crime was terrible but that, on the flip side, bikers really ought to be more careful about obeying traffic laws.

But I can’t blame the commenter; for most people, the anti-bike reaction is nearly Pavlovian. In fact, when I told my girlfriend of five years and my best friend of fourteen that I’d be writing this column, both of them immediately began to complain about bikers. To their credit, they eventually backtracked and decided that I was an exception — one of the good ones, so to speak. Thanks, guys.