To the hipster riding the fixed gear red bike who turned onto Bloomfield off Isleville, you’re lucky to be alive. You were wearing earphones while riding a bike in the city, are you a fucking moron? I barely missed you as you blew the stop sign, bobbing your head looking behind you. You didn’t even hear the screeching of the rubber on the road as I narrowly avoided turning you into road pizza. Then you give me a dirty look because you realized I was so close to you. Yup, there’s a reason I’m that close to you, you fuckin idiot.
Ride the bike or listen to your hipster tunes. You can only do one at a time.
Now don’t go all “Ohh, another four-wheeled bitch against the two-wheelers” on me. I’m a cyclist myself, but I follow the rules. —HaliMike
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2012.
Blowing the stop sign and not looking around sounds like the problem, not the music.
you need all your senses when you’re riding a two wheeler
Arse peddlers take their life in their own hands. I hate the sights of them but I guess they can’t ride the sidewalks.
spare me the lecture on coming to a stop at a stop sign.
Most drivers will perform a rolling stop out of habit, with complete stops only after a rolling stop reveals that they can not proceed.
yet, when a bicycle does the same, every cranky idiot driver comes out of the wood work to complain.
And you don’t need all your senses driving something with four wheels that has multiple blind spots? Deaf people can’t ride bikes?
If the idiot on the bike had bothered to stop and look around, it wouldn’t have been an issue.
with all the cocks around yet. but hey, i was at the hosp. yestersay, and no less than 5 fucking asshole bikers were riding on the sidewalk. the last dude fucking near ran into me. i grabbed his bike and brought him to a dead stop. he looks at me and opens his mouth to say something, and a cop just happens to drive up.
i told that fool the next time, get the fuck on the road where you belong, if not, leave the fucking bike home. the cop was not at all pleased with response from dude, and gave him a ticket, and said something about seizing bikes from now on. that is a very good idea. if you can’t obey the rules in a car, then it gets gets towed.
buddy started to argue and cop said that if he opened his mouth just once more, he would get busted for failing to comply with an order from the police, good. if these fucking idiots want room on the streets, why fucking go on the sidewalks. then whine about people getting in their way.
i forgot to mention one thing about those assholes, the lone female was texting someone. can you fucking believe that. i have fucking near seen it all now.
Drivers are generally very courteous and safe around garbage trucks, street sweeper, all forms of slow moving traffic.
But whenn it comes to bikes, the drivers get stupid. Common sense rules are forgotten. Rules like “pass, only when it is safe to do so” and “keep a safe distance”
Be honest. How many times as a driver have we squeezed past a bike simply because we let our impatience over rule our desire to be safe?
We hate being unsafe yet we will do it often enough that we start to hate bikers. Our bad driving choices are not their fault. A biker is only doing what we are doing, ie trying to get somewhere like work or home.
Just putting this out there: it’s possible for someone to have headphones in their ears and have their MP3 player turned off/paused. I walk around with my earbuds in, but I always pause my iPod when crossing the street, and yet this didn’t prevent an old woman from honking at me (she was at a red light, I had the little white stick figure’s permission to cross the street) and telling me to “get those things out of (your) ears!”
Maybe focus less on supporting your argument with things you can’t know for sure and use things you know for sure (he’s a shitty bike rider, for one). The end.
I put my headphones on so people wont talk to me.
GV got it right in his/her first post. Most people roll through stop signs, including cyclists/motorists. It’s equivalent to looking only one way before crossing the street. I don’t see any problem with it, since it’s normally done to circumvent a fairly restrictive law (complete stops, seriously? Fuck that).
That said, “blowing” the stop sign is not the same as cautiously and slowly rolling through the stop sign.
Also, if hipster didn’t react to screeching tires, then the volume was probably pretty loud. Again, headphones with moderate volume is okay while cycling. You can still hear what’s going on around you (I cycle with one ear bud in, on low volume), and it’s probably less distracting than driving around with music cranked full blast, which is probably just as common as cyclists wearing ear buds.
Also, OB: “Music or drive: you choose”