Dan Frankowski wrote:
2. If a bike and a car have an accident, the biker is far more likely
than the car driver to get injured. These situations are not equal. We
should put more efforts into making bikes welcome.
This does not take into account that the car driver has been scared
silly and feels terrible at having hit someone. It's much worse if the
person hit is a child.
However, I daily witness bike riders behaving so badly that I'm
surprised there aren't more accidents than there are. Yesterday on
Portland Ave. a bike rider was on the far right side of the road bed
traveling north. The bike path is on the left side of the road and, of
course, Portland is a one way southbound.
Knowing that 31st and Portland is a high accident corner (running red
lights usually the cause), three bike riders yesterday "inched" into the
intersection till they were in the middle of the street while the red
light glared above them. Two hours later I tried to pass through the
intersection again, but an accident and two squad cars blocked it.
Three of my housemates travel almost exclusively by bicycle. I've
watched every one of them run red lights, travel on the wrong side of
the road, use Park and Portland, but avoid the bike lanes, not have
proper lights on their bikes and reflective clothing on themselves, and
in every way make it tough not to hit them with a car. My peeps are
scofflaws of the first order. This does not make them much different
from other bike riders for it is seldom I see a bike rider kitted out to
ride and ready to attend to the laws that will keep him/her from getting
smushed.
Presently, I'm mostly annoyed by bike riders, but when I drove for the
MTC, I hated them quite thoroughly. I think it started when I saw a bike
slide under a bus at Seventh and Nicollet one day. The bike was running
on the Nicollet sidewalk, putting the several hundred rush hour
pedestrians at risk for life and limb, then hitting the brakes when he
saw the bus looming in front of him. There was ice on the sidewalk and
whoosh, he was under the bus in front of the duals. Thank god
pedestrians started thumping on the bus and yelling, because the driver
had no idea there was a bicycle under his bus. So I'm largely
unsympathetic toward bike riders, most of them seem determined to commit
suicide by car driver.
WizardMarks, Central
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