As I was driving home from work, there was a report on the radio of a bicyclist struck two blocks from my office. My first thought was that I hoped it wasn’t someone I knew. I have a number of friends and colleagues who bike to and from work.
I thought about and rejected the idea of bicycling to work because it is simply too dangerous. Traffic is bad enough for those of us in cars. Bicycling is putting yourself out there without that protective turtle-like shell. No thanks.
I’ve tweeted on occasion about the frustrations I have experienced with bicyclists as a pedestrian, dog walker and driver. Let me say first that some long-time cyclists are awesome. They know and follow the rules. There are many others, however, who do not. They are the bicyclist version of taxi drivers. All motorists in the city know and are wary of taxi drivers because they change lanes erratically, run traffic lights and don’t bother with stop signs on a lot of Capitol Hill streets. I’ve nearly been run over them on more than one occasion.
Some younger bicyclists fall into this category – they seem to feel that it is their duty to do whatever they want, irrespective of laws or manners – when they are on a bicycle. They run stop signs, drive on sidewalks, ride against traffic patterns on one way streets, cut off car drivers (not kidding here!), and yell from a block away at car drivers if they think the person might be about to open a car door – even if there is plenty of room between the car and the bike lane.
I really like the idea of having more bicyclists and fewer cars on the roads, but it isn’t going to work until bicyclists treat bicycling with the same respect that drivers must learn. Maybe the only way they can get that is to be licensed just like other drivers. I don’t know, but I’ve seen bicyclists run into pedestrians in crosswalks, scatter people on sidewalks, nearly run over dogs or into leashes by riding between dog and human, and all sorts of other stuff.
Every time I hear of a bicyclist killed or injured in traffic, my heart hurts for them. But it also hurts for the driver of the vehicle who hit them, because I know there’s a good chance the bicyclist did something that was illegal or dangerous, and the vehicle driver didn’t see the bike in time to stop whatever happened.
