It was was a year later that a violent incident on the same roadway elevated the cycling movement in Asheville to the next level. On a Sunday morning in July, Alan Simons was riding with his wife and his three year old son in a child seat. A driver, Charles Diez, was upset that Simons was riding with a child on the four lane road. Diez confronted the biker in a parking lot, and as Simons walked away, the off duty fireman aimed a .38 caliber pistol at Simons’ head and fired. As luck would have it, the bullet penetrated the outer shell of his helmet but missed striking flesh by less than an inch.

Sule was travelling on the day of the shooting, but this time he found a dozen messages on his phone immediately after the incident became public. Sule was taken aback because the act of road rage from a public servant was so egregious, but at the same time he wasn’t shocked. That’s because confrontations between cyclists and motorists aren’t uncommon in this small city in the southern Appalachians where an acceptance of urban cycling has struggled to take hold. While Johnson’s death drew very little attention, it was the Simons’ shooting that drew the ire of riders and those who see bicycles as an obstruction. While the edge of roads everywhere are often the battle ground between cyclists and motorists, the tension here has boiled over, making Asheville seem more like a hotbed of anti-cycling hostility rather than an urban cycling mecca.

On the other hand, the shooting, argues Sule, added a sense of urgency to the fledgling urban cycling movement, springing it from a grassroots campaign to a cohesive political one. And despite the setbacks, Sule will tell you that urban cycling in Asheville may be on the verge of a breakthrough.

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It may be true that progressive ideas take longer to take catch on in the south, but Asheville isn’t a typical southern city. After all, there are few places in this NASCAR mad region willing to allow the permanent transformation of its only stock car oval into a velodrome. The city has a century old reputation of embracing unconventional lifestyles and attracting a counterculture of misfits, artists,

Skully by S-Sun