City Questions
We’re all familiar with drivers getting frustrated sharing the road with cyclists. However, sometimes the frustration gives way to another frustrating behavior. That of asking questions. When I’m on my bike, drivers seem to find me very approachable when they need help with something.
Apparently, I am the person to ask. I don’t know why but they assume I am in the know and can help them navigate their troubled city life… I guess urban cyclist means urban expert?
However, I’m sometimes uncomfortable thrown into the role of city guide. And that’s when I start messing with them.
Which is entertaining. But sometimes I wish they’d ask me a question I can actually answer.
“I’m sorry, but you’ve chosen a hopelessly bad place to be starting from” is always a good answer if your interlocutor has been rather curt. Another favourite of mine with rural drivers of ostentatiously large SUVs is to say “I could give you a route: but the lanes are too narrow and there’s a weak bridge halfway.”
I think more than the locality assumption is the simple fact that there are no walls around us as we ride, making it easier to talk to us than a motorist closed up in his or her vehicle.
They ask us because they sense dimly that cyclists are people of above-average intelligence with fully oxygenated brains, alert and fully aware of their surroundings because they have to be in order to survive at all.
The amount of spatial awareness necessary to drive a car is quite frighteningly low. Every few months now in the UK we hear stories of SatNav systems malfunctioning with the result that within a few minutes a vast pile of vehicles has accumulated at the end of some quiet suburban cul-de-sac which the drivers were led to believe was the access road for the M4 motorway. There have also been cases of motorists being directed by their GPS onto the wrong carriageway and driving for miles quite unable to work out why everyone is swerving and crashing into the barriers to avoid them. Cocooned in the illusory safety of their metal boxes, they just don’t seem to have that cyclist’s acute sense of er, something not quite right here…