I had an incident while riding my bike yesterday that had me shaking my head about the attitude of some drivers towards bicyclists in the US, and was thinking about writing about it. Then i had an incident today that got me thinking a little more broadly.
Incident 1 - on the bike, on a rural road
I'm riding north on Burden Lake Road, near the
north end of the lake. The bridge over the inlet to the lake is narrow, two cars can pass in opposite directions, but if there's a cyclist there, there isn't quite enough room. But it's a short bridge, so the bottleneck isn't for long, and it is posted 30mph so you're not supposed to be driving that fast anyway. So I'm heading up a slight uphill, and two cars come south, and we meet up at about the same time. This is where the car coming behind me from the south shows up, and is slightly delayed because there's no room. They go by 5 seconds or so later when the road clears, and this is where it gets festive. They go very slow as they pass and the passenger shouts "F**k You" out the window. His point was unclear, but I guess they were unhappy about sharing a public road with a cyclist, at least on the odd occasion where it costs them 5 or 10 seconds.
Later that night, driving home from a trip out, I found myself behind what appeared to be the same car, being driven very badly by a very inattentive and probably very young driver, likely fresh out of driver's ed. At the time, I was thinking in terms of a blog post about how driver's ed in the US fails to teach anything at all about how to share the road with cyclists; this was hardly the first incident I've had where drivers simply refuse to pay attention to the rules of the road, and do things that place cyclists at great risk of injury.
But then today, there was...
Incident 2 - at a 4 way stop w/pedestrian crosswalk in urban Schenectady
I'm heading back to my car after lunch. As I reach the street, there are no cars at the stop signs, but there is a car to the right (west) which is slowing down to stop. The crosswalk is on the east side of the intersection. I step in, and as I reach the 1/2 way point the car comes to a full stop, pauses, and rolls into the intersection slowly. Although I'm crossing at my normal pace of maybe 3.5mph (respectable pacing for a pedestrian, if you ask me), and not wasting time, he feels the need as he rolls behind me through the intersection to lean on his horn to let me know he thinks i should have run in order to clear the way for him, or else halted.
I don't want to claim to be a paragon, like everybody I have my bad moments behind the wheel. But for crying out loud, what are we teaching these drivers about courtesy? or maybe they're beyond education, are and always will be first class assholes. You got me.
