Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Just a gentle reminder...

Several readers have commented on my post about no-hands riders on narrow, two-way bike paths. The commenters would rather ride on streets, sharing the streets with traffic, rather than use paths provided by our kindly city planners.

The idea is, correct me if I'm wrong, that the no-hands dude is on the bike path. My commenters are on Maple Street - where it's safe.

My feeling is that the no-hands dude's cousin - the guy who got him started on cheap beer and smokeless tobacco - is driving his sweet old GMC one-handed on Maple as I type. He's just caught his on-again, off-again honey text-messaging the counter guy at Advance Auto Parts. 

The cousin's boss said that if he clocks in late just once more, he's outta there. He's late now.

I'll wave at you guys from the bike path - keeping the other hand safely on my handlebar.

3 comments:

Khal said...

I guess the bottom line is that no place is absolutely safe. One can surmise that crashing into a witless cyclist and breaking a collarbone is less toxic that being hit by a badly driven Yukon and being scraped up and taken to the morgue--or doing one's next training ride on a motorized wheelchair.

We have to run the numbers, eh? Probability of the crash times severity of crash equals risk.

One can usually avoid the witless path riders, but that definitely means I won't be riding hard on said paths.

Dan Brekke said...

Maynard -- why the ugly stereotypes?

I'll bet the cousin's driving an F150.

Khal said...

Or a Dodge Ram 1500...