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“BTW, it’s very rural where I live, so I am not one of the jerks you see biking all the time...”

I’d suggest some sort of rear view mirror.

I live in a rural area too. Saturday evening I’m driving the 30 mile trip back home from town. It’s a route that gets a fair share of bicyclists because we’re on the ‘cycling map’ due to the annual Tour de Gila. Anyway, I’m about halfway home and I see a cyclist a ways up the road. It’s a 60mph speed limit along this highway. There is nothing around, just me coming up on the cyclist, and he’s heading the same direction as I am. For some reason, maybe he just decided he’d gone far enough, he decides to do a U-turn right in front of me. I had to slam on the brakes and swerve onto the shoulder to avoid splattering him. Perhaps he was suicidal or something because he couldn’t have done a better job at trying to get run over. Maybe he didn’t have any sort of rear view mirror. Thus my suggestion.

As another poster mentioned, a pair of gloves is a must! I’ve still got a good sized bandage on the palm of my right hand from braking my fall in a decent wipe out almost two weeks ago now. However, my bike has a motor.

“Perhaps he was suicidal or something because he couldn’t have done a better job at trying to get run over.”

I can relate to that because we have a Metropark with a main road that has a single speed limit of 35mph and double-yellow centerlines almost all the way around due to that speed limit, blind curves and an abundance of possible turns into and out of the driveways of picnic areas along the main road. It’s only been a month since three 17 year-old HS students tried to negotiate a 30mph turn there at 80+ but they didn’t make it. Two more of their buddies survived the plunge from 40-50 feet over the guardrail and fence into the rocks and a low-flowing river...Only a month later, scattered small groups of bicyclists are acting out by switching from a tandem formation to riding abreast just as my truck approaches their “comfort zone”. This tactic of theirs impedes traffic and it makes the environment even more unsafe for them, helmet and gloves or no helmet and gloves. The majority of these activists are not young people. They tend to be mid-50 to sixty-something and are out there trying to dominate the road, not share it...and to make things worse, they continue to agitate drivers the way they do, knowing full well what occurred there just one month ago. When it happens, it won’t be me, but when it does happen, I won’t feel a thing for the guy on the bike if it ends up being who I think it’ll be.