They're all out there, using the same roads and sidewalks, traversing the city in a fashion that, seen from a distance, appears like some impossibly complex dance. It's a cacophony of travel, the clash of which causes fear, injury and the occasional tragedy.

One such tragedy occurred several weeks ago, when Back Bay resident William Spring was crossing Commonwealth Avenue. He was struck by a bicyclist, thrown and severely hurt. He remains, as of this writing, in the hospital in a coma.

We regrettably have become accustomed to injury and death from automobiles and trucks. Bicycle accidents, particularly severe accidents, are rare, however. Usually it is the bicyclist that fears getting hit by a motor vehicle. Pedestrians normally do not see themselves at risk.

It turns out that the bicyclist in question was a messenger. That fact has provoked a mini-storm of controversy.

Bicycle messengers seemingly swarm through downtown Boston during the day. In their zeal to deliver their packages as rapidly as possible, they often disobey the rules of the road and the rules of common sense. They weave among stopped cars, hop from sidewalk to road and back again, run red and yellow lights, travel the wrong way down one-way streets and generally strike fear amongst the downtown crowd.

Bill Spring's accident has raised the familiar cry, "Something must be done." The solutions seem obvious — license and regulate and train messengers — but on closer inspection these strategies turn out to be ineffective.

They are ineffective for this simple reason: laws regulating bike messengers are already on the books. They have been since 1991. They haven't stopped the problem downtown, and they did nothing to help Bill Spring.

Boston has rules requiring messengers to carry a license and to wear a distinctive vest with their license number on it. By most accounts, however, few messengers follow these rules. The rules themselves are impossible to enforce. Why? Because non-messenger bicyclists do not have to carry a license or wear a vest. So imagine, for a moment, that you're a police officer. A bicyclist passes you with a backpack. Messenger? Student? Commuter? If a messenger, he or she should be wearing a vest. But you can't see it, so you can't do anything.

The Boston Police Department now has a task force assigned to look into the bicycle messenger problem. It hopes to come out with recommendations early in 1998. It'll be tough. If the task force chooses to go in the direction of more regulation, it in some fashion will have to include a requirement that all bicyclists be licensed, something that very likely would require state legislation.

Tougher regulation has a second problem as well. It makes everyone feel good when it passes, but months later, after the hue and cry has died down, other events come up that capture the attention of the police and the public. Enforcement goes slack, and the old problems return.

Fixes in Boston's existing ordinances would be welcome, of course. But making the streets safer may require other solutions that are more self-working. One idea, proposed by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, is for businesses themselves to become the enforcers. If all Boston businesses agreed to accept packages only from trained and licensed messengers, compliance with the law would increase. Another thought is to put the liability insurance requirements on the messenger companies themselves, so that they would have a strong incentive to make sure their employees were well-trained and obeyed the rules of the road.

Even better solutions will require rethinking how we use our roads and sidewalks. Right now autos and trucks rule the roads. Boston makes little provision for bicyclists. Setting aside some of the road for bicyclists could not only help public safety, but could also encourage others to get out of their cars and rely upon a mode of transportation that is still safer and less polluting than its internal combustion counterparts.