The other day, riding home from downtown Ocean Shores, I encountered a wrong-way cyclist. I always find people going the wrong way to be PARTICULARLY irritating and probably more so when I'm on my bike than if I'm in a motor vehicle. Walking against traffic is the right thing to do. RIDING a wheeled vehicle against traffic is, simply, STOOPID. I know that people imagine they want to see oncoming traffic in case they decide they need to dump their bike in the ditch. Clearly, they don't read this blog, and equally clearly, they have never really thought through the mechanism of how you'd jump off your bike into the ditch and how quickly such an action could be completed. It's not like walking where you can simply side step on your very next step.
Anyway, in my irritation, I informed the "salmon" that "you're riding the wrong way." I forgot that it is pretty STOOPID to imagine the willfully ignorant "salmon" represents a teachable moment.
Hence, the title of this post.
Anyway, in my irritation, I informed the "salmon" that "you're riding the wrong way." I forgot that it is pretty STOOPID to imagine the willfully ignorant "salmon" represents a teachable moment.
Hence, the title of this post.
4 comments:
A couple of salmon incidents come to mind: i was once crashed while dodging a couple of tweenage girls, another time i purposely elbowed a guy as we passed (i was younger and aggressive in those days). The last one involved an older guy on the other side of a busy road, who shot me a dirty look and shouted "What the f#@! are you looking at?"
i've had COPS tell me to ride into traffic FFS! Where do people get these ideas?
Does this include riding on the shoulder?
Just curious...
Chandra, it is unwise to ride against traffic, even on a shoulder or on a sidewalk. Motorists making turns or going in/out of driveways are simply not going to be expecting something to be coming from the wrong direction at a speed three (or more) times that of a pedestrian. Things are even simpler in Ocean Shores, since there are not shoulders on the local roads and it is illegal to ride on the few sidewalks they have.
Mike W, my own scariest salmon incident was documented at https://dfwptp.blogspot.com/2011/08/texas-salmon-unique-species.html
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No Need for Non-Robot proof here!