No, they weren’t in a hurry, either. They - two of them - were just sort of meandering on their bicycles down Pennsylvania Avenue (between about 14th and 11th Sts. NW, headed east), about 10:30am yesterday, keeping an eye on the Cherry Blossom tourists I guess (no idea whether they were D.C. police, Park Police, or what - their shirts just said ‘POLICE’ in big letters) and they were weaving between cars stopped at lights, then cruising through the intersection on the red light if there was no cross traffic.
Great example, guys. If bicycle cops in no particular hurry don’t feel obligated to obey traffic laws, then why the fuck should any other cyclists feel obligated to do so?
For the first time in seven years, I have to say that I do not believe an RTFirefly post. C’mon, no cross traffic at a red-light intersection? In Washington DC? Long enough for two bike riders to run the light? Suuuuuuure! :dubious:
Of course, I thought of the possibility, before reading your description, that like all police, they are held to a different standard when responding to an emergency “Code One” or the equivalent in other systems – e.g., “On approaching a stop sign or stoplight displaying red, either come to a momentary stop or reduce speed greatly until you have verified that impinging traffic is giving you the right of way, then proceed.”
But the vision of two adult bicycle cops, holding a revolving light above their head with one hand while making ululating siren sounds with their voices like nine-year-old boys, cracked me up!
And for one of the few times in seven years, I can thoroughly agree with an RTFirefly post. Apparently, the whole damn executive branch is above the law.
Remember, this isn’t the tourist part of town; this is the Federal Triangle, which means not much local traffic on a Saturday morning. It also helps to know that this was a stretch with a lot of streets (13th, 11th, 10th) dead-ending in the next block south of Pennsylvania Ave, which prevents most of the cross traffic anyway.
I should add that when I say they were weaving in between the stopped cars, I mean weaving, as in not maintaining a straight course. They’d be riding in between two lanes, then cut across a lane between two stopped cars (behind one, in front of the other) to go forward in the gap between lanes, one lane over. And then they’d cruise across the red.
I’ve seen them do it as well. To be fair, I see a lot of bicyclists do the same thing.
Polycarp, that part of town is dead on the weekends since it is mostly offices. From what I recall, there aren’t that many restaurants open on the weekends.
There’s a big hill near my house where the street dips under a railway bridge. It’s a minor street but fairly busy, and the stretch from the top of the hill to the bottom has 2 stop signs at intersections with very, very minor streets. I take this street almost daily and there’s a car at one of those intersections maybe once a week.
Suffice it to say, the temptation to ignore the stop signs, in either direction, is ENORMOUS for a cyclist. Going down, they slow you down a lot, and going up, it is extremely difficult to get going again after stopping, especially when you’re already winded from climbing the hill.
Yet I stop. I’m such a sucker. In the interests of full disclosure I will say that they are rolling stops unless there is a car in the intersection, but I never, ever blow through them (mostly because I know that as soon as I do I will get smushed, and I fear the posthumous approbation from other cyclists like our fair OP, who would wonder why I did such a stupid thing).
But once I saw four bike cops blow through both signs going downhill.
Not trying to be a samrtass, but if other cyclists want to run a red light I’m sure
they’d be willing to take the chance of getting a ticket . Leading by example is
something that your parents are responsible for, no ?
There’s this thing, Unc, called an arrival process, a stochastic process that explains why random events cluster in time. You might want to read up on it.
The temptation to run a stop sign at the bottom of a hill is one that I understand completely.
The D.C. cops didn’t have that excuse. Pennsylvania Avenue is basically flat on that particular stretch, and they were going at maybe 5 mph, so preservation of momentum was not a concern.
If they’d been zipping along, I’d have assumed they had somewhere they needed to be in a hurry, but they weren’t.
There’s always that risk, but it’s a small one. Cyclists are rarely ticketed, and even if they are, they don’t need to show a license (you don’t need to carry one to ride a bike), so there’s no points, no effect on your insurance rates, none of that extra stuff. Just the fine.
Well that doesn’t sound too bad. I agree that cops don’t always obey the law
but what can you do ? I’m just glad to see them doing thier jobs. Unless it’s giving me a ticket.
The reason this bothers me most is that we cyclists catch a lot of flak for disobeying traffic laws. And of course it’s mostly the occasional cyclists who just don’t give a damn, and kids who haven’t been taught properly by their parents. Serious cyclists, and semi-serious weekend cyclists like me, are pretty good about following the rules. But the flak bothers me anyway.
So when police on bicycles ignore all the traffic laws, what slim hope I might have that occasional cyclists might learn from their example goes right out the window. This crap is going to go on as long as I live.
And there are also clusters of events, the cause of which cannot be attributed to randomness. Your petulant choler, to me, would seem to be the causative impulse for this particular cluster.
