Ride into work for Thursday, 26 May
Rode in from the chiropractor's today. I was going to do a tour of Aliant locations in honour of the person at Aliant who's spent the last couple of days reading through the site (come on, it's not *that* exciting!) but I decided not to as it was too windy. I took the back roads, which were a bit more sheltered due to the trees on either side for most of the way.
Had another collision with a car today. I was waiting to turn right at a right light, when a car behind me decided to overtake me and hit my mirror. I banged on the roof of his car as he didn't seem to have noticed me, he continued on and then slowed down as I pulled out behind him and he started shouting at me and threw a piece of gum at me. I rode past him, he pulled in front of me and tried to stop me, so I just kept riding around him. I think he realised how stupid he was being as he turned off. What was really heartwarming was at the next set of lights, a guy pulled up in his car and asked if I was OK, said he'd seen the whole thing and was willing to be a witness if I caught the guy's plate. I thanked him and said not to worry, it was a regular occurrence, but it was nice to see that not all drivers get their license out of a cereal packet...
Distance logged: 28.695km
Time: 1:22:00
Average speed: 21.0km/hr
Temperature: 8C, windy, drizzle
Cumulative distance: 2233.095km
Had another collision with a car today. I was waiting to turn right at a right light, when a car behind me decided to overtake me and hit my mirror. I banged on the roof of his car as he didn't seem to have noticed me, he continued on and then slowed down as I pulled out behind him and he started shouting at me and threw a piece of gum at me. I rode past him, he pulled in front of me and tried to stop me, so I just kept riding around him. I think he realised how stupid he was being as he turned off. What was really heartwarming was at the next set of lights, a guy pulled up in his car and asked if I was OK, said he'd seen the whole thing and was willing to be a witness if I caught the guy's plate. I thanked him and said not to worry, it was a regular occurrence, but it was nice to see that not all drivers get their license out of a cereal packet...
Distance logged: 28.695km
Time: 1:22:00
Average speed: 21.0km/hr
Temperature: 8C, windy, drizzle
Cumulative distance: 2233.095km
posted by steve at 5/26/2005 10:35:00 am
2 Comments:
Cars colliding with you should not be a regular occurence, I hope you are exaggerating :) Not a bad idea to carry a pen and paper to write down the plate, and even if you do nothing with this information it may make the idiots nervous. Glad it was your mirror and not you.
Well, they don't collide, they usually just nudge me. I'm not exaggerating the frequency, though - in the last month I think I've been hit 4 or 5 times. My theory is that Halifax, being a university town, has a lot of students that ride bikes, and unfortunately they ride them fairly poorly. This has the effect of irritating drivers and causing them to assume all riders are students, are incompetent, and are therefore not worth giving any space to. I came to this conclusion because while I was cycling over winter, I had nothing but courteous behaviour from car drivers, it's only since spring started and the students came out of hibernation that I've had these problems.
Admittedly, it may be partially my fault, as drivers don't expect bikes to be trundling along at 40km/hr...
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