Even if you’re being nice, saying hello, or giving the thumbs up, don’t honk at bikers. Please. It’s unnerving.
When someone honks, I feel like I’m going to get hit, and the first thing that happens is that I swerve. If I swerve off the road, I could hit gravel and fall. If I’m worried I could hit gravel, I could swerve back into the road, and that’s not any better.
My second instinct is to flip the bird, but I never do it. But I’m thinking it.
If you want to be nice, wave. I’ll normally see it. Or pull over; I like to talk. But don’t honk.
Every day, at least five or ten people honk at me. Most mean well, but a few lean out the window and yell, “Get off the road!”
I don’t ride on the interstate. Any road that I am on, I have a legal right to be on, and I pay the same taxes as anyone else.
Normally, I’m on the edge of the road, or the shoulder if there is one. If I’m in the road, there’s a good reason for it. If the shoulder is uneven or gravelly, it is unsafe for me to be on. And again, I have a legal right to the whole lane if I want it. All of it.
If I am in a lane and you don’t feel safe passing me, don’t do it. In most states, you are required to leave three to five feet between you and a bicycle. If you come closer and hit me, you will be liable, not me, with very few exceptions.
Don’t mess with me.
Haven’t made it to the temple of stoicism yet, it seems.
— OSweet · Jul 20, 10:43 PM · #
I think people are getting ruder about this. I used to bike all the time, when I was a sweet young thing of twenty, and I’ve taken it back up again as a salty middle-aged thing of forty-nine.
Some things have changed for the better. Bike helmets. Rearview mirrors for bike handlebars. Bike handlebars. Gear ratios and shifting mechanisms that don’t need, I’ve discovered, to be finessed like a virtuoso on a Stradivarius.
But motorists have gotten worse. I was never hooted at or bellowed at from moving cars before this year. And, I don’t care how much middle-aged spread I’ve developed, it’s hardly to the point where motorists need to complain about it—at least, not yet!
My sympathy for your close encounters of a vehicular kind aside, I wanted to let you know, though i don’t comment a lot, I’m reading every single word. And I’m completely enthralled!
Keep it up—the biking and the blogging. And blessed be.
— Cat Chapin-Bishop · Jul 21, 09:16 PM · #
Thanks for this comment. I’ll keep that in mind when encountering bikes on the road.
— Karen King · Jul 28, 11:32 PM · #