You can say I am full of shit, but truth is, 10 % of drivers never see CM in their life or even hear of it. It teaches them nothing.
I bet not even 10% of drivers in the Bay Area, maybe even SF proper have ever seen a single bike on a CM ride, let alone been inconvenienced repeatedly by it.
As I wrote while you were typing this, well over 90% of driver/cyclist interactions are fine. Where do you get the idea that as many as 10% of drivers are clueless, etc.? You must be riding on some really really mean streets
I also wrote that drivers don’t react to bladers in the street the same way as bikes even when the behavior is the same in the same places, the same time and the same roads. Why is that I wonder?
I’ll agree that fewer than 10% of drivers in the Bay Area have seen CM, but almost everyone is inconvinienced by it as all bus traffic downtown grinds to a halt whenever CM rides down Market or crosses Market. As the cross streets back up, the 7th street and 5th street exists clog and back onto the freeway.
It’s a figure of speech. It’s a small minority of drivers who need the education, so justifying CM by saying it educates drivers is like randomly side swiping riders and claiming they need to signal. The punishment is non-correlative with the crime, so all it does is perpetuate the notion that it’s “us” vs. “them”.
If CM were to ride around on the roads, occupying all possible (legal) lanes but otherwise obeying every single traffic law, and then hunting down careless drivers and beating the living shit out of them, I’d be far more supportive of them breaking the law in that manner than the present scenario. At least in that case the punishment is correlated with the crime.
The fact that CM riders regularly stage crimes where crimes did not occur is absolutely intolerable.
I know it is the pit, but can you show a little more cleverness besuises proving you can type “douchebag” over and over again?
I gather that now you pulled over and the guy would not pass you? How about instead of me guessing based on my own experiences riding on hills, including Marin Headlands, that you just dole out the entire story with all the relevant details, start to finish, so we can discuss it instead of you getting upset when we don’t know exactly what is in your head and getting blamed for trying to fill in the blanks?
Also, as you might well know if you are familiar with bike v. car incidents in the Bay Area, Marin has its own special set of problems.
If it is truly your desire to see cyclists knocked around a little if they don’t get out of the way of cars, you might be in the best place of all in the Bay Area when you are in Marin.
[QUOTE]
The roads exist as avenues of conveyance. To be used to to get from one point to another. When some douchebag like you stops your bike on the road causing to traffic to back up through five or six red lights they are stopped in that road intentionally to prevent me and others from going about our business, I should be able to remove you from my path.
[/quote[
OK, sure, once again, that is not the current laws of the road, and you know it. You are free to seek a legislative change to the status quo, but in the meantime, you are going to have to restrain yourself.
But I know you are just blustering, you would never do it. Nor would you expect that if you are on a bike and somehow cars are stacked up behind you, that they would be able to do what they can “to remove you from [their]
path”.
:rolleyes:
That is strong motivation indeed. It is what makes our roads work as they do for the most part.
Hmm. Thanks for reminding us how much ignorance remains to be fought.
OK, well next time there is a bulldozer in the street tearing a building or something down, and cyclists are so upset over the blocking of the lane by jersey barriers or whatever that they are compelled to stand in front of it rather then simply ride around the obstacle, let me know. I find that inconceivable, but you never know. I’d hardly think someone protesting a demolition is there to also protest the road conditions, which is what we are talking about in this thread, but hey if that is how you feel, thanks for sharing.
Phew! :rolleyes:
:rolleyes:
OK thanks for sharing. You want people and bikes mangled but not dead. :smack:
Can you recommend for us how vehicles should go about imparting the type of injury you describe?
:rolleyes:
A non-stupid, non-douchebag would would tell the entire story in a way that made that clear. You didn’t even say if you were going up hill or down. And, according to the OP, this is a pitting of bad cyclists, so why should we assume from your vague story, without all the significant facts even from your point of view, that you are not to blame even in part?
There is simply not enough information to say.
:rolleyes:
Yeah you don’t want to punush anyone, we understand. You just want to do it this way.
:rolleyes:
You mean, as in the middle of a really, really long list?
You forgot to say “douchebag”. :rolleyes:
I said 60 cars would be a good day of riding, not that YOUR ride was all day or not. In my experience, you can sure ride on a busy day on those roads and see only 60 cars. In the Bay Area, that is good, because you can see that in a block in the cities or a mile or less in the suburbs.
I hope you enjoyed the day (or however much of it you were riding).
If you don’t want people to read between the lines, then tell the whole story and make a coherent conclusion.
After all this, all I can say about what you mean is that the car treated you bad, but it is probably OK, because asshole cyclists deserve to be taught a lesson but not punished. By the standard you gave above, you got off light - no injuries that you have mentioned, and I guess no mangled bike since you didn’t mention that either.
Really, I think in a way you are making my point - You seem to feel that you are a safe rider and when cars threaten you, it is their fault. That may very well be.
But you also seem to feel that other riders deserve to be hit by cars, have their bikes mangled and their bodies bruised.
Ok. :dubious:
So tell us, how is the driver to tell the difference between once cyclist and the next? Which should he mangle, and which should he let live to ride another day?
Would you say that of the people mangled in even Marin County in the last, oh 10 years or so, of which there are plenty (or if you live elsewhere, the people mangled there), do they fall into the category you just described as being worthy of being hit by a car regardless of the legal obligations of the driver, or were they possibly riding safely as you were in your incident?
Because it seems either you are the only safe rider deserving of being spared, or some people have managed to be hit wrongly by drivers while riding safely, and it could happen to you someday. None of them went out and planned to get hit while riding safely.
In the latter case, those are the sorts of drivers we are concerned about. The ones that hit safe riders like you.
:rolleyes:
Sorry my bad on that one. :smack: Stop by sometime, I will do my best to give you back 5 extra seconds to your life. My fondest wish is that you will use it to type “douchebag” as many times as you can.
So one day a month, people who are downtown are inconvenienced and backed up on surface streets before they get to the Bay Bridge or 101 a mile or so away where they will be stuck in traffic jams anyway?
Do you have the same ire for the daily accidents caused by drivers that keep the traffic copters busy and traffic reports on the radio every 10 minutes 24/7?
Come on, let’s have a sense of scale.
Even if that does bother you, no way that 10% of drivers in the Bay Area are in SF downtown that day, no matter how inconvenient it is.
Heck, if they keep running into the same problem, they can just mark their calendars and that one day, many of them can take BART to work. Many lines have adequate parking - I used to drive up the Peninsula to Millbrae, park for free, and ride to the exact area you mention from there. There are many other options for instance too.
That stretch and others nearby get backed up for all kinds of reasons, Giants games, rush hour, accident, festival, whatever. It is life in the big city, and to the extent it is predictable, whose fault is it to get caught when there are other options? I mean, I know to avoid certain areas during baseball games, so I do, or if I can’t, I just wait a few minutes until I get through. That is what music is for
OK, so let’s try to use precision with the idea of actually scoping out the size of the problem, then maybe a solution can be found. Can we agree that loose “figures of speech” have not helped reach a solution so far and start from there?
BTW, the problem where I live is not CM, nor is it heavy traffic - it is simply unawareness in a rural/suburb environment on the part of drivers that riders exist or how to manage sharing the road with us when we do show up.
So, as I tried to do a few posts up, let’s see if we can brainstorm up a metric that we might be able to measure and the devise a way to improve it.
I suggested, for urban places such as the Bay Area (or Seattle probably too, never ridden there but have been there), that “successfully managed interaction ratio” could do it.
In the rural area where I am now, that might need to be different, but let’s start with that… what do you think? How could we improve it? Measure it? Other suggested metrics? The floor is open …
There is probably room for lots of tactics in advocacy. But (figure of speech 90% of cyclist/driver interactions during CM are still fine, it is just that there are more of them in a concentrated area, and the nature of the interactions that go bad might not be the same as during the rest of the month in that area.
But my metric would still account for that and it wouldn’t change unless both groups behaved better, so there is that aspect to it too…
Not in the Bay Area - left about 1.5 years ago, so not familiar with what you are alluding to. In order to avoid setting off another string of “douchebag” from magellan01, can you fill me in on your evidence and the legal conclusion? It might well be, but I have not been there to see the papers.
Speaking of which. I was in SF for New Years eve, and that area was plenty blacked up and pedestrians were given many streets, while cars were surrounded by them and trapped for quite some time. I know there was some street crime because I saw the police action with my own eyes, evidence of arrest and so forth. How is that really different from CM in principle I wonder? Because festivals like that happen in that exact area alone several times a year, and other places too.
Like I said, maybe a metric to track that depends on the behavior of both groups, and when both groups improve, safety and traffic satisfaction improves for everyone, would be a good idea for a constructive GD thread?
I’ve just quoted your one piece of idiocy here. It appears that you are, amazingly, even dumber than I initially thought. You truly, and this is not just blustery hyperbole, are not very bright. You can’t track conversations, you shouldn’t do anything touching percentages (that exchange of yours actually hurt my head there was so erroneous about it), you can’t grasp analogies, you can’t keep a thought that was clarified in your head beyond that post, and you still don’t see that if you do not have information that it is wrong of you to start ascribing subsequent events to an event relayed to you. And that when you’re called on such sophmoric stupidity, it is not a defense to blame the original poster for not providing the details. You get to comment on what is posted, not is what is not posted. It’s really that simple.
I’d slap your silly ass around, but it’s boring and I might as well slap around a mop for all the effect it seems to be having.
I’ll point you to TVEblen’s beautiful post to you. Now, I know its the pit and there’s a tendency to take some of what is written here is bluster. But take her’s to heart really. Or you can just continue pedaling through life as the douchebag you are right now.
And you whine about courtesy, yet you refuse to extend to the readers here the most basic courtesy and post in the manner that everyone else does, one that makes it easier for all to follow. I’m surprised a mod hasn’t suggested as much. But you go right on with your bad self, douchebag.
They certainly make me think of something, but it’s not safety.
It will remind me that not only are many people on bicycles completely incapable of actually following traffic regulations and doing things like stopping at stop signs, there’s also a high asshole ratio.
What CM does is make me want them off the road, not that I should drive more carefully. Critical Mass(holes) make me think that when a bike gets into an accident with a car, the bike probably caused it.
So you take everything you read on the web right to heart, huh? You dwell over them and your life is altered. Even the ones with, you know, wildly various opinions. I’m sure you remembered the many pro/anti-gun threads and thereafter purchased a weapon. Or maybe surrendered one to the police to be destroyed. Did boot your cat outside after one of the many indoor vs. outdoor cat threads? These things get so confusing.
You’re a real mensch to enlighten everybody this way. No, really! You’re just swell. You’ve really changed hearts and minds around here, that’s for damned sure. Why, to think I’d dismissed you as just another self-righteous asshole tapping away at a keyboard somewhere.
Show of hands for all those lured from the Dark Side by not_alice’s heroic message board posts now…
Sorry you had such a bad day and I made it worse by pointing out the actual contradictions in your posts when you tried to make an actual point.
I have seen your posts before, I know you can do better. I am sure you will on a better day.
In the meantime, if you really truly feel that the law is unfair and that you and other drivers should be able to hit cyclists with their vehicle to the point that they are bumped and bruised and their cycles mangled, you have every right to pursue your elected representatives to modify the law to allow that.
It sounds like you might be in the Bay Area - you might not know that Joe Simitian, who represents the Palo Alto area (or did while I lived there anyway) makes it a special point to introduce a bill suggested by a constituent each year. Why not start there? Good luck!
Until you get your senses back, do be aware that your recent posts in this thread are the equivalent of a 2 year old throwing a tantrum kicking and screaming on the floor. All anyone can do really is watch that they don’t hurt themselves and wait for them to tire themselves out.
So you take everything you read on the web right to heart, huh? /QUOTE]
“To heart”?
No, but everything I read does get filed away somehow. And it necessarily changes the weight of what was there before.
This is not necessarily a conscious thing. So unless my brain is different from anyone else’s, and I don’t think it is, then I think this happens to everyone even if they are not aware of it.
I come here to learn and be exposed to other opinions, not to look at the pretty pixels on the screen. I think that is true for all of us - if nothing else there are a lot more pretty places to go then here.
I am fine if you or others are so enraged by what you wrote that when you see bikes that rage comes back to your mind, because I trust the result is you will decide to give the evil cyclists a wide berth so that they won’t do something stupid and put you at risk.
I find that preferable to the alternative that you won’t even notice the cyclist at all, because that would put the cyclist and the driver at higher risk of an accident.
As for the alternative that you will be enraged enough to run the cyclist down, I find that sort of accident extremely rare compared to the sort where the driver wasn’t aware of the cyclist at all, so I will take my chances. I know no one here is going to do that, despite the bluster of some.
I mean, are you gonna hit some cyclist just to prove I am wrong about this? I don’t think so. You will notice the cyclists more then before, and then you will manage the interactions to the best of your ability, which I am sure is more then good enough.
Aside from you being terrible at making a coherent argument, are you actually denying that Critical Mass riders intentionally obstruct traffic and break the rules of the road? Because whether you agree with it or not, saying that they don’t do that is completely idiotic.
It is very gratifying to learn that the only people who don’t dislike Critical Mass intensely are the riders themselves. Henceforth I propose that the worst insult on the internet shall be that a person has “Critical Mass Mentality”.
I saw my first Critical Mass rally in late August, just after we moved to San Diego. I had heard of the organization before, and as someone who believes that cars should share the road with bikes, CM always struck me as a great idea.
But then i saw the reality.
We live in a condo/apartment thingy, and our front balcony overlooks one of the main avenues in the San Diego neighborhoods north of Balboa Park. That Friday evening, my wife called me out to the balcony to see the Critical Mass people riding by. I looked and thought, “Wow, this is really cool.” There was a HUGE group of bikes, extending as far as i could see down the avenue, and as they rode past our place i could hear them yelling and singing and ringing their bells. It all sounded really fun and happy.
But it was sort of like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the ghosts and spirits that come out of the Ark all look beautiful and friendly at first, but then turn into ravening demons that cause the Nazis’ faces to melt.
It soon became clear to me, after watching for a while, that about three quarters of the CM riders were happy to stay in their lane and were simply out for a social gathering and a nice ride on a lovely SoCal evening. But the rest were there for no reason except to cause grief to as many other road users as possible. They would ride not only in the turn lane, but in the opposing lane, weaving in an out of cars and, in some cases, doing their absolute best to get in the way of traffic.
Some of them would, for no apparent reason, simply pull across the road and stop their bikes in front of cars coming in the opposite direction. Not only did they pay no heed to Stop signs or traffic lights, but they gave no quarter to pedestrians trying to cross the road, forcing the walkers to wait while the who massive train of bikes went by. I would have thought that an organization committed to the idea of road-sharing would have some empathy for pedestrians, but these assholes were concerned with themselves and no-one else.
I came back inside having lost all of my illusions about Critical Mass. Which is really a shame, because i think that Critical Mass rides in which everyone obeys the traffic rules and shows the same consideration that they expect from drivers would actually be a good way to raise awareness about road-sharing.
Epilogue:
At my pick-up softball game a few days later, one of the regulars had a large bandage on his finger. He had been on the ride, and had gotten involved in an altercation with a driver. The driver had exited his car, and there had been a scuffle, during which my softball acquaintance apparently had the top of his finger bitten off! I didn’t make too many inquiries about who started it because, as some of the news stories already linked in this thread show, there are nearly always two diametrically opposed stories in cases like this, and in the absence of impartial witnesses, getting to the truth is pretty difficult.
Anybody want to parse that first paragraph because the tiny bit I’ve salvaged is seriously too weird for belief. Deep delusion in action here, folks.
Your contribution to this thread might be slightly memorable for a few weeks but mostly for the amusement value. Frankly we’ve had a helluva lot weirder, angrier and even more irrational jerks drift in and back out. You’re a master of unintended comedy though, and unintended consequences as well. I feel confident stating that the responsible cyclists of my acquaintance, some pretty activist themselves, would firmly distance themselves from your smug jerking off lest they be tainted by association. The most passionate of my cycling friends got policies adopted to paint bike lanes whenever roadwork is done and painted onto major streets and wrote an extended series of newspaper articles on urban biking. They both loathe CM and say so often and publicly.
See, like most posters here, I’m a safe and considerate driver. Some of them are frequent bikers as well. See, we take care anyway to avoid injuring cyclists, pedestrians, unmindful children and hell, I even brake for adorable furry critters, plus the stray armadillo and ugly amphibian. The overwhelming sentiment here has been respect for the rules of the road.
You know, the ones CM shits on, all in the name of raising awareness and mutual respect. Your defense of those tactics pretty much makes you arrogant, stupider than a box of hammers, an attention whore or a combination thereof.
Which is okay because it can be mildly diverting to cuff idiots around like cat toys once in a while. So knock yourself out but sheesh, what a moron.
Drivers of cars and trucks in my opinion operate like they are entitled to the road and this plays out in them tailgating, honking, inching up in the intersection, wanting to pull out in front of another car from a parking space even though there’s no cars behind the car they’re trying to pull out in front of.
Many of you have gone on about how you are safe drivers and riders, I kind of find that pretty hard to believe based on what’s been written here. I empathize with not_alice because I know of what she speaks. I live in NYC, drive here and have biked here and whether I’m on my bike or in my car I see drivers that are pretty much just not paying attention to what’s going on and that’s just with other car traffic. When it comes to bikes they don’t want to yield if they even see the bike and so consequently if you’re a biker you have to take a much more aggressive stance to space otherwise you’ll find people turning into you, following too close, signaling right and turning left and vice versa or veering right only to make a left U turn.
Car drivers in my experience aren’t usually equiped with the right state of mind to share the road with with people not in cars be that a motorcycle, bicycle, skates or simply someone on foot.
This may often be true, but I think it’s also pretty fair to say that Critical Mass riders often do not have the right state of mind to share the road with anyone. What would otherwise be a positive message and display of numbers sometimes turns into a mob on a power trip.
Did you run a red light? Did you swerve into oncoming traffic and play chicken with her? I’m guessing no; you were probably obeying the traffic laws. I don’t think anyone here has any problem with that. It’s the illegal, reckless, and intentionally imflammatory behaviour that crops up in CM participants (not all, I’m sure) that this thread is complaining about.
Could I ask you about your thoughts on Courteous Mass (or Critical Manners; they seem to be essentially the same), and whether or not you think that’s more or less effective than an event where intentionally dangerous behaviour can crop up often? You seem to be asking for everyone involved–drivers and riders alike–to peacefully share the road completely and obey all traffic laws. I think everyone here (except maybe BlinkingDuck) agrees, and would like to see that. I just don’t think dangerous demostrations are the best way to bring that about.
I lived in Baltimore for over 7 years, and the drivers of that city exhibit the worst combination of incompetence, obliviousness, and sheer homicidal don’t-give-a-fuckery of any city i’ve ever been. Pedestrian crosswalks don’t mean a thing to the typical Baltimore driver, and Stop signs and red lights are taken as mere suggestions, to be blithely ignored if you happen to be in a hurry.
I lived for about 3 years right near the corner of Calvert and 29th Street, and i lost count of the number of crashes on that corner caused by someone running a red light. The worst ones were always the ones where you heard no skid before the crunch, because you knew then that it was a hard hit. I came out once to find a car had gone partially airborne and landed on the trunk of a parked car on 29th.
Combine the awful Baltimore drivers with a city that doesn’t have the money for proper street maintenance (ensuring that large potholes and cracks are allowed to grow unchecked), and you have a place where riding a bike should be classified as a deadly sport.
Man, you’re one dumb bitch. There were no contradictions in what I wrote. The contradictions came after you decided to put words in my mouth. But you’re too stupid to realize a fraction of the errors you’ve made in this thread.
Annd the icing on the cake is that the fIrst time you deign to post like the rest of us and contain the points you are responding to in quote boxes, YOU GO AND PUT WORDS IN THERE THAT I DID NOT SAY.:eek::smack::eek::smack::rolleyes: You might want to know that that is a violation of board rules. And I don’t thing there’s an imbecilic douchebag exception. You may want to check.
However, autos and bikes are not very compatable. What I would like to see is a as equivalent as possible a bike system in which bikes and autos and pedestrians are separated as much as possible. One of the irritating things about biking is that pedestrians will be on the bike trail when there is a perfectly good sidewalk nearby paralleling it.
If such a system existed, I think many people would try biking to work/other places.
