HEY AWESOME

[spatch]

1. The Great Gatsby is a story about a circus clown who falls in love with a one-armed stenographer and, after getting married on a Graaf Zeppelin, must team up to fight Bolsheviks on Easter Island.

2. It's perfectly legal and totally okay to, when you ride a bike down College Avenue, zip right between a double line of cars stopped at the Store 24 light and heydily hoidily zoom through the red light into the middle of Davis Square.

3. Curt Schilling is a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

One of those statements is true. One. Though I'd sure pony up money for that first story.

I watched the incident in #2 happen this morning. At the risk of stuffing this little feller here full of straw and waving him around angrily, I wonder if Mr. Wonder Biker is the same type of fellow who complains that cars don't treat bicyclists with respect. Would we have seen an angry, indignant post in davis_square today had he clipped himself on someone's side view mirror or been cussed at by a driver in the line? Or would this guy, who's already shown he doesn't give a tinker's damn, have taken a header and then picked himself up, brushed himself off and started all over again?

But facts is facts, and if you're on a bike you obey the same traffic laws as a driver.

I'm growing increasingly curious about observing these idiot riders as there is a bicycle coming my way and, honestly, I grew up in towns with hills and almost-paved roads with wide shoulders and an infrequent number of automobiles coming by. This kind of urban riding annoys and unnerves me, and I want to enjoy nice happy fun ride time, but I don't want to be lumped into the same category as Tommy Trafficlight there to whom the rules of the road apparently don't apply. Also, I have a severe and distinct phobia of side view mirrors.

Luckily we do have a nice system of rail trails around which I believe I'll be enjoying now that the weather's nicer.

Comments

[rosalux.livejournal.com]

It's probably safer than it looks, at least right up to the sailing through red lights part.

But you also can totally obey traffic laws on your bike, and be just fine. I don't run reds (okay, that's not true - on back streets I will stop and look for traffic and then go, if I'm not hauling the kid.) or split lanes and biking is still cheaper, faster, and more fun than a car or the bus. You'll get over the side view mirror thing - the space between a car and a bike looks a LOT wider from the bike's side.

And lots of urban riders crash all the time, and just get back up. The problems come when the cars think you should get out of the way when you *are* following traffic rules.

[spatch]

Unfortunately I believe this is a vicious circle. Jackass biker rides unsafely and pisses off a car driver, who then decides "Hey, who's got the bigger conveyance here?" and proceeds to treat all bikers like Jackass Biker -- and then these bikers, treated as Guilty Without Proving Otherwise, decide "Hey, we have the right of way too" and proceed to piss off more drivers, who proceed to piss off more bikers, and the next thing you know, Critical Mass is blocking all the Charles River bridges and winning absolutely no fans at all.

But I guess I'm not about to start my odyssey by purposefully taking the busiest streets in Boscamberville. Gotta start small and work yer way up. I figure the trepidation will subside eventually and I'll make it over to the Emerald Necklace by mid-2009.

Heh. I just realized that without local context, "Emerald Necklace" sounds like a location in an MMORPG or something.

[lno.livejournal.com]

You say "Emerald Necklace", I think pearl necklace, and then I segue right to porn in the Emerald City with the Wizard of Oz.

THANKS A LOT.