So, Chafe City is perhaps the best bicycle blog on the planet. I don’t know why it doesn’t get much mention or re-linking. Maybe it’s the lack of suhegzy photos or local-handmade-artisan anything?
Today I read this recent post, and when I got to item 5, I laughed because the “wildly unpredictable cyclist” is one of my favorite bicycle flops. After coming to the conclusion that shouting wildly with my fist in the air wasn’t getting my point across to the people who have done really stupid stuff that might kill me, I started riding and communicating in a new way. One of those is the unpredictable-but-not-unsafe move — I started doing that on group rides where people who didn’t know me were trying to follow too close on descents — which is a bad idea, because I’m exactly not the person to follow into a corner — so I noticed that if i did a little swervey-feint at the top as things were getting stretched out, the smart people (Read: people who can descend more aggressively and safely than me at high speed) would give me a few feet. I later realized it works the same way in normal traffic — otherwise intelligent people who drive aggressively (i.e. the people who see you but act like asses anyway) will give you a couple extra feet if they think you might be a little crazy.
More importantly, I’ve also found that rather than yelling obscenities at that obscenity-inducing driver who just nearly killed me, it’s often more effective to yell something like “Oh my god! please don’t kill me!” or “I just want to get home to my family alive!” or (my favorite, this week) “why are you trying to kill me?” It probably helps to be a fairly petite lady who looks like she was at the office (rather than at a road race). Burly, 6-foot-tall dudes probably won’t benefit from this feign. However, I usually get lots of apologies and so far, not a single finger or obscenity (at least that I could hear). Maybe they go home and curse about me, but the mom-like-lady-who-threw-her-mini-van-in-reverse-at-the-stop-light-when-I-was-behind her put her hand to her heart and looked like she was going to cry when I asked her (so sincerely!) why she wanted me dead. I can only hope that will help her remember that mirrors are there for a reason.
On a semi-related note, given the weather this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that drivers who don’t stop for pedestrians attempting to use crosswalks when it is raining are agents of the devil. There’s no way any non-morally-bankrupt person could see someone getting totally drenched and think “I can’t spare 10 seconds in my dry, climate-controlled machine to allow a human being to safely get across the road when buckets are falling from the sky.”
