Big Kids
When I was a kid, biking was my favorite activity (after drawing.) Luckily I had a lot of space to do it.
When I started biking to work I hadn’t ridden a bike in 10-15 years. I’d never experienced biking for transportation. So it was not surprising that getting on a bike made me feel like a kid again… except I found myself biking in this:
It was anything but carefree. I realized pretty quick that I couldn’t bike like a kid and I had to pay attention. The city was an entirely different thing with potential for dangerous situations and the need to be careful.
However at least once a week I see someone do something careless like this:
Without even flinching or showing any awareness that they were almost killed. I just wanna say you guys SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF ME!
I’ve heard some brush it off and say they’re only putting themselves at risk. But, last time I checked, cities have more than one person. So when you do something careless like take a sudden left from the far right of the right lane…
You could set off a chain of events and put others at risk. Nope, you can’t bike like a kid anymore.
Are you Left Handed??
Hi,
Although I live and bike in Switzerland, I am still able to pretend being a kid. Not during the all lengh of my commute trip, but during a few seconds (traffic does catch my attention ;-). I dream of having a laser beam to cut into pieces the cars in front of me or laterraly. Otherwise, it is always fun to project stones or acorns with my front wheel. When no cars is on sight, I happily slalom between the road paint marks.
Thanks a lot for your drawings; I look forward to read the next ones.
Chris
Oh yes, I am always scared for other people I see in dangerous situations. Like today I let out a little shriek as the bus mirror passed only 6″ from the head of the very tall dude biking in the lane ahead of me. In this case it was the bus passing too closely (an EZE ride Shuttle, not an MBTA bus) but it still had my heart in my mouth. A slight wobble to miss a pothole and he would have been under the bus wheels.
Sometimes it’s not just my pedaling that gets my heart rate up, unfortunately.
And yes, I think bikers need to act like big kids if they’re going to be taken seriously, which means paying attention and not doing stupid stuff. Traffic is a social contract, and my feeling is that we all need to obey the rules in order to be partners in the contract.
Yes, I like the notion of them not acting like big kids too. Explains a lot of the “style” of the comments I see posted online defending their actions. 😉
The last one about other bicyclists causing crashes is really good to emphasize. I’ve heard that only about 30% of bicycle accidents (crashes) are between bicycles and cars, the rest are people just falling over and/or crashing with other bicyclists. You may have heard of 30 Days of Biking which is this month and one of the founders (here in Minneapolis) got in a serious crash (multiple broken bones) on his bike when a bicyclist did just what you illustrated above – made a left turn right in front of him! The guy who caused the accident was not touched and didn’t even stop!
I *LOVE* the 30 Days of Biking peeps! Sadly, the dangerous behavior is something I see in Boston every day. 🙁
Got to be careful of those statistics — were they counting adult cyclists only, or adults and kids? My accident rate as a child was just a wee bit higher than it is now. I once saw a kid on a bike on the MM trail just sort of spontaneously crash with no obstacle to run into.