Since it will never see actual print…
Irradiated by Stingray
I’m going to let y’all get a chuckle or two (hopefully) over a letter going to the editor of our local paper, the Los Alamos Monitor. The letter to which I am responding is availible for your perusal here, but the upshot is that drivers were being mean to bicyclists. For reference, the road mentioned in both letters is a narrow two-lane highway. The white stripe is less than a foot from the edge of the pavement, and the shoulder is maybe two feet wide, tops, and there ain’t a lot of car-friendly room past it. There are more blind curves on this road than you can shake a stick at, and the local mobile hood ornament population simply adores clogging it, blithering on about how the law says they’re allowed to be there. They never seem to consider that the laws of physics say a ten thousand pound truck doing fifty-plus miles an hour might take precedence. I’ve removed the original writer’s name here since the internet is often full of jerks, for whatever good it’ll do. Anyway, on with the show:
Editor,
In his letter of 6 September, [redacted] opines that the local drivers do not show proper reverence to the local bicycle aficionados. He even goes so far as to remind us once again that some twit made it into law that these mobile hood ornaments are given the same rights and responsibilities as a motor vehicle (though, strangely, I never see them keeping up the responsibilities end of that arrangement as they breeze through stop signs and traffic lights), citing 66-3-702 of the state code. Unfortunately, [redacted] stopped reading the statute a bit too soon. If he had pressed on to 66-3-705-C, he would have found that “Notwithstanding any provision of this section, no bicycle shall be operated on any roadway in a manner that would create a public safety hazard.” On a two-lane highway with a very narrow shoulder, such as NM 4, any encounter with one of these gasping gits dressed as a reject from “Tron” is a safety hazard. Some probably experience a wonderful thrill when faced with a Buick approaching at 50 miles per hour in the wrong lane as it swerves around one of these rolling senses of entitlement, but I am not such a thrill-seeker. Having repeatedly stress-tested my brakes coming around the curves of NM 4, and finding myself forced to choose between an oncoming truck or a panting, day-glo clad lawsuit, my sympathies lie entirely with the motorists [redacted] described expressing their anger at being forced to suffer these fools.
Sincerely,
Stingray
Update: I’ll be damned, they actually printed it!
September 7th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Bravo, sir. Bravo!
Exquisitely well put!
September 8th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Tucson is a college town, isn’t it? I imagine you’ve got similar problems…
September 8th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Not really, LabRat. The city of Tucson is very bicycle-friendly with wide bicycle lanes on most of the streets. There’s a big annual bike race here that mucks up traffic, but we don’t a lot in the way of narrow twisties that we have to share with the pedal-pusher crowd.
But damn, there is a lot of day-glo spandex!
September 9th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Ah well. I went to school in New Orleans, which is chockablock with narrow and one-way streets, so I learned to live in hyper-alertness behind the wheel for those special occasions when I’d come around the corner on a one-way and see a bicyclist bearing down on me at Mach Two.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Does NM have an impeding traffic law?
In OR, an RV or a bicycle that has more than 5(?) vehicles backed up behind it can get a whopping fine ( based on the number of vehicles impeded ) if they don’t pull over and let the conga line pass.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Kristopher: Off the top of my head, I don’t know if we have such a law or not. I do know that if there is one, enforcement of it is non-existent here. Part of the problem though is that some of the stretches of road that are the most problematic (such as the one described in both letters), are technically outside Los Alamos County. I think the short version is just that it’s a weird town with weird ways.
July 24th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Alright, here we go. You don’t know me anymore so I don’t expect any civility in this, but I thought you might be interested in hearing that there’s a cyclist side to it OTHER than spandex-clad roadies, who are actually jocks who tend to drive Cadillac Escalades in their spare time — with empty bike racks, of course, so everyone with a vagina knows they have money and an active lifestyle.
Three years ago, I had my last car. It was a mostly primer-gray ’76 Olds Delta 88 Royale. It was a fucking V8 relic, it was the death of the automotive industry, and the last car I will ever have.
Now I ride a bicycle. In fact, I have spent two years building a bicycle recyclery. We have a storefront and a repair stand and a set of tools and a library of manuals and free instruction etc., so I re-build and frankenstein together some smooth and unique machines to pay the shop’s rent, and teach people to have a demystified and independent form of TRANSPORTATION. I yell that word because your experience with roadies — who are athletes, so training is basically recreation — obscures the point.
Now I’m running out of time for my actual argument.
Alright, “no bicycle shall be operated on any roadway in a manner that would create a public safety hazard.” The “public safety hazard” you’re trying to invent is what, exactly? The hazard of a lawsuit? Generally, if you hit a cyclist, they are going to die. That is a personal safety hazard. It is how I get around, it is how I get to work, and it is the way it is. It is cheap, I can fix anything that goes wrong, and I get all ripped with muscle.
It’s not car vs. bicycle, it’s monkey vs. monkey. One has a bigger tool. Unless you’re from Texas or have something penile to compensate for, the superiority of one machine or the other is up in the air and a separate debate entirely.
Cars are fuel efficient on long trips at highway speed. The majority of car trips that happen, however, are a half-mile to the fucking grocery store. Bicycles are actually FASTER in these short distances, anyway. When I am going to work from my house on a residential 25-mph street and doing at least the speed limit, cars will pass me. If you are on the same street and a CAR is doing 25 in front of you, you would NOT pass them. (If you would, you’ve got some rage issues that can be solved by simply getting rid of your fucking car. Those things make you crazy and give you ulcers. And yes, I am a doctor and a shrink.)
The best passive-aggressive shit is when cars veer around me right before a stop sign, so I have to breathe their exhaust and wait longer. Generally, I retaliate on this one and ride around in front of them and follow the law, which is put one foot on the ground, and slowly look both ways before proceeding.
So you’re talking about recreational cyclists and I’m talking about vehicles. Now, I would love to have separate bike lanes on every road, but in this town they’re actually REMOVING bike lanes. Our statute is that cars must give us three feet when passing. They don’t. The other part of the statute says we must ride as far to the right as safely practicable, so if I’ve got a fucking-up decaying shoulder on a two-lane road, I ride in the fucking center of the lane. If you DON’T antagonize me and pretend you are ook-ook-big-man who can honk-honk and wants to kill me for going home from work, I’ll slow you down and let you pass at a safe speed.
I’m really late so I don’t get to edit this. Just try to weigh out “lawsuit” and “death.” You don’t have nearly as much on the line in these confrontations. You sound like a money-grubbing douchebag and it’s not at all becoming.
July 24th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I would say you’re in much less danger of getting an uncivil response because we don’t know you anymore than because you decided to include the “money-grubbing douchebag” line in an otherwise perfectly sound argument. Do you, or do you not, want to have a civil conversation?
The “public safety hazard” IS the danger of the cyclist being killed, as no matter what you think of drivers, WE DON’T WANT TO COMMIT MURDER. As much as we might dislike the damage to the car from the contact with the bicycle, it’s much more aggravating because bikers who ride dangerously- which, and this is a very local argument, include riding in the middle of a lane on a road with no shoulders, plenty of blind curves, and a speed limit of 50mph- give the driver of the vehicle about three seconds to decide whether he’s going to hit the cyclist or veer into oncoming traffic and hope the other driver has stunt training.
My husband wrote this, not me, but I agree with his point- I’m tired of having cardiac episodes because a cyclist (who is, as you point out, operating a vehicle in traffic) decided that stop signs, red lights, and one-way street signs didn’t apply to him.
If you’d bothered to continue reading rather than accusing us of money-grubbing douchery, you would have seen that neither of us remotely mind cyclists who ARE riding lawfully. Why should we object? The letter to the editor was in response to another letter from a cyclist complaining about… how annoying the drivers were on that same no-shoulders, blind-curves, 50mph speed limit road.