pbraymond
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pburke wrote:
If it was just drivers not looking... I've had people jump out of their cars/vans trying to beat me up for insisting on my right of way. One guy even pulled a knife waving it in the air, yelling at me to be thankful that he didn't kill me (running a red light), just because I yelled at him as he was about to flatten me with his uninsured and unregistered truck.
The fear of somebody texting and veering into the bike lane is always there, but cars pulling into your bike lane on purpose, then slamming on their brakes in front of you is actually are a more liely encounter. Those types of hostile moves are the normal state of commuting fun in a "bike-friendly" city in America. Just yesterday a car came up from behind, extra close, maybe 6 inches from me, windows rolled down and all passengers screaming at the top of their lungs hoping to scare me into a fall.
In my view, even in a "liberal town" like Madison WI, the density of idiots, jackasses, jerks, and selfish me-firsters per square mile is far too high for me to survive my commutes on a bike for much longer. 35,000 miles over the last 5 years will teach you some things about the character of the people around you. That is something like 120 days on the bike, 24 hours, so more or less a year worth of 8 hours riding per day. In those hours you meet people who are absolutely generous, want to make your day by being kind and safe, and then there are others who are filled with hate, rage, and anger and will see a cyclist in the road as the personification of all liberal evils that has made their lot in life what it is. Or they are just BMW driver who live to yell the F word at you a the to of their lungs... I could tell you so many stories.
I am actually going to mount a "dashcam" on my bike, because I am 100% certain there will be more incidents and I want proof of what happened, in case I survive. Falling because of snow and ice? I have full control over that and no worries. Getting plowed off the road because some Dodge RAM driver felt he could ignore a red light because he was bigger than me, that's where the real danger lies.
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That's quite a smorgasbord of incidents, Peter. I only ride for recreation, and usually on lesser traveled roads and/or off peak, though that's not an option for commuting. The reason I don't bicycle commute is due to having to share the (busy) road at some point in the journey in a city where cyclists are afterthoughts to most of the driving public. I've fortunately only had a couple of occasions of driver malice, with a smattering of driver inattention issues through about 20% of your mileage in the past 5 years. Fortunately I've never been brake-checked.
The driver behavior you mention is too common, and in daily driving it's it's the steel cages we have around us that make the risk more tolerable than on a bicycle, which is sad. Your comments tend to make me question the belief that says when we achieve critical mass of cyclists in a city, drivers will show more care/restraint/consideration; if stuff like that happens in Madison, I fear most cities will have a rough go of getting "bike friendly". Wishing you safe riding for however long you continue to ride.
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