Thursday, April 05, 2012
bikers are idiots!
This video is making it's way around the interweb. Exhibit A on why I hate bikers.
Not to glorify hit-and-run, but why was the cyclist ignoring those two pedestrian lanes? And why was he riding on the far left side of the vehicle lane? Cyclists use the saying "share the road" all the time, but they're not really interested in sharing.
In other news, there will be a party at my house on Friday, August 24th, for Stage Five of the Pro Cycling Challenge. The party will actually start on Thursday at Incline Happy Hour, then continue on a pub crawl down to Benny's to watch the race.
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7 comments:
Hell, I'm scared to ride on my weenie suburban streets.
Love how the drivers box the hit-and-run driver in. Awesome!
Reminds of a great story. I'm walking in the NYC Wall Street district one morning, and this guy runs down the street with a purse. All of a sudden, two rather large guys in immaculate (and undoubtedly really expensive) suits drop their briefcases and BOLT after the guy. They tackle him in the middle of the street right near the Stock Exchange and hold him down for the police. Ha! Sucker!
Come on Brownie. I will cut you some slack if you have never ridden in an area of high traffic and no shoulder, otherwise as a lifelong rider and runner I have to call you out on this one. The rider was exactly where he should have been. If you do not take your place in the lane you WILL be hit. This happened because the driver was either a jerk or inattentive. Either way the driver is at fault. Can bikers be complete arseholes about traffic? Yes. In my experience for every biker that flaunts the rules of the road, there are 100 drivers that are dangerous to everyone around them. Tolerance people.
Randy Wolfe
Prescott, AZ
I joke about bikers a lot because I know a lot of them. I definitely give kudos to folks who commute by bike (though not as much as those who commute by running, of course).
At fault or not, I still say the biker had a huge lack of common sense by using that lane, when there were two uncrowded pedestrian lanes available.
It is an interesting eye-witness of pretty much all the bike vs. car complaints. There certainly is a dedicated ped lane next to the bridge, but it looks pretty narrow and packed with people who have to dodge each other just walking. I'm not sure if both of those lanes are actually open, it looked like (at the end of the video) there was a barrier on the 'open' lane. The infrastructure is crappy, the drivers were bad, and the cyclist was riding in a dangerous spot (more later).
However, with being in that lane, I agree with Randy that the rider taking the lane for visibility purposes wasn't a bad idea, either.
And it sounds like, soon,they'll be adding "Bikes May Use Full Lane" signs on that bridge to remind all clueless Pennsylvanians how to drive.
Before the accident, lots of cars are swerving around the cyclist, kind of at the last minute and somewhat dangerously. This shows, to me, how crappy and mindlessly most people drive (but also, they're not looking for bikes). Instead of a bike, it could have been a stalled vehicle, animal, debris, etc. People drive mindlessly at speeds that don't give them time to react to hazards. Oh, and the particular driver was speeding around everyone else, but we have a higher tolerance for that.
In that respect, the video showed probably a handful of crappy driving behaviours: speeding, overdriving your speed, last-minute lane changes, and a freakin' hit and run -- but the one cyclist is the one that sticks out.
However, considering all of those factors, I get what you're saying. I have what I think is a relatively high tolerance for riding in traffic -- I've ridden the lane in anything in Denver, and worse (Arvada, Aurora, Thornton), and pretty much all the canyons around here...and I'm not sure I would have made that particular decision. Part of the decision would be trying to haul ass at 20-25mph on a road bike to mitigate the speed difference, but if I were cruising on a mt. bike like that guy, that's an even better reason to use the ped bridge, even if you have to walk. Because the other factor is being *trapped on a bridge.* You have to ask yourself what you would do if you had a flat/mechanical. In this case, you would temporarily have to be standing right in the road. Taking the lane is one thing if you can easily hop over to the curb/shoulder in an emergency, but if you're trapped in traffic by a jersey barrier, I'm not sure I would make that decision. Sometimes you follow a road and get trapped in crappy situations like that before you get a chance to turn around, but I don't think I'd knowingly ride there.
Meant to say, "but the one cyclist is the one that sticks out, because it's something different."
Because we're more habituated to crappy driving and seeing car accident aftermath pretty much every day, so car-vs-car is less interesting.
(Although, I would suggest this one from Russia.)
I've actually run and driven this bridge hundreds of times while at Lehigh and can say this is the first person I've ever seen riding the street over this bridge (I did food delivery for a few years too so I drove it multiple times a day). Even the serious riders avoid this bridge as there is a better one less than a quarter mile to the east that has a dedicated bike lane. This is also the on ramp to the highway, much like riding an on ramp to I-25 where cars are going to be accelerating to 60+ as fast as possible. In my opinion, he should have been on the other bridge to begin with or in the pedestrian lane. Not arguing the fact that bikes have a right to the street but this location and situation could have easily been avoided!
Lehigh FTW! Loved it when they beat Duke!
That's the thing I hate about the share the road argument. Yes, you should be able to bike on the road. You should also look for better options for riding.
Colorado Ave gets packed with cyclists. It's very busy, there isn't any extra room. But bikers flock there for some reason. One stinkin' block to the south is a pedestrian paved trail. One stinkin block to the north is Pikes Peak Ave, which is very wide and sees very little traffic. But everybody bikes on Colorado Ave, and nobody bikes on the pedestrian trail or Pikes Peak. I just don't understand this.
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