Posted on 08/17/2012 3:49:13 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Police are looking for an elderly, white, gray-haired man who, in an apparent fit of road rage, chased a bicyclist onto a golf course in Santa Rosa and ran him down.
The bicyclist told Santa Rosa police he was cycling down Pythian Road at about 5 p.m. Wednesday when the driver began yelling at him and tried to hit him.
To get the angry motorist off his tail, the cyclist told police he raced onto the nearby Oakmont Golf Course. But the driver steered onto the course and continued chasing him, eventually hitting him before speeding away.
The cyclist had moderate injuries and was transported to a local hospital. He described the driver as an elderly man with gray hair, and the car as a gold or beige sedan similar to a Toyota Corolla.
The sedan may have a broken passenger side mirror, police said.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.sfgate.com ...
The laws of physics disagree with you. I go with the laws of physics. Inertia and gravity are pretty hard to argue with. You go on and try to force your will upon physics.
I personally don’t have a problem with sharing the roads with bicyclists, or pedestrians for that matter.
But there are rules, and these two groups blatantly refuse to follow them.
Sharing the roads whether cars vs cars, cars vs trucks, bicycles vs pedestrians, etc. is based on trust and right of way.
If no one trusted anyone else driving, than stoplights would be worthless because no one would venture into an intersection without stopping. Likewise crosswalks.
Bicyclists, especially, violate that trust by routinely and blatantly ignoring traffic rules and laws. When you compound that by the fact that they’re fragile, and tiny compared to most of the other vehicles on the road, its a dangerous situation for everyone. If a bicycle is such a difficult vehicle to operate that the rider can’t signal their intentions, stop at stop signs and stoplights (not to mention crosswalks), then perhaps they shouldn’t be sharing the roads.
That’s not to say motorists, or motorcyclists or trucks or any other vehicle is blameless as a group, but my observation is the percentage of other vehicles that run stop signs without even slowing down is around 5%, but with bicyclists it’s around 80%. Failing to signal with other vehicles is probably 40%, and bicyclists, it’s 99%.
Pedestrians, as a group, at least have the good sense not to dare cars to hit them, in most cases. I don’t know why bicyclists don’t seem to have that kind of sense.
“Probably a Tea Party member.”
I can narrow it down a bit - it was an armed, right-wing extremist Tea Party member.
“Bicyclists (lunatics) in the Bay Area get no sympathy from me. Theyre a nuisance and they make themselves nuisances, especially in San Francisco!”
I’d like to know exactly how many tickets get issued each year to bicyclists, who are almost uniformly required to obey the rules of the road while they are on a PUBLIC ROAD.
If I had the necessary skill set, I'd put together a short animated feature on "the life of a road." It would start with the game trail that became an Indian path that became a pioneer trail that eventually developed into a country dirt road, wide enough for a horse drawn wagon. And then would come the early automobiles, few in numbers and relatively slow. Throughout these long eras, the road would be an equal access right of way, a thoroughfare for anyone passing by on foot, on horseback, in a carriage or wagon, a bicycle or a car. It was a pleasant place, easily shared, and crossable.
At some point, however, the cars get bigger and faster, and non-motorized travel begins to become hazardous. Eventually the cars preempt everything else, and the traffic density makes visting your neighbor across the street a life-threatening activity. In the final evolution, the road is fenced, totally dedicated to automobiles, and an impassible barrier for anyone else, including the neighbors who have lived along it for many years.
And the motorists have trouble realizing that anything has changed.
Roads should not become barriers. In urban and suburban areas, crossings should be frequent, and there should be sidewalks/shoulders/bike lanes to accommodate non-motorists. If that makes me a dingaling, so be it.
These people crack me up. Locally they’re trying to figure out the best way to scam the taxpayers into paying to repave a bike path. When I grew up, pavement was the least of my worries while riding. We road on the railroad bed, farm trails, grass etc. Hell I still go ride the dirt roads.
Someone suggested that the people who actually use the path should pay for it if they want it paved. This sent the cyclists into fits of worrying that people who don’t pay will use it anyway. Funny thing is that they were worried about non paying riders but don’t have any problem with forcing non riders to pay.
Hell, I live on a dirt street that hasn’t seen a snowplow in decades but I still pay taxes on it. My solution isn’t to throw a fit and ask them to fix it. My solution is for them to stop taxing it and let my neighbor and I divide the property among ourselves.
Now why would she be wearing something like that if she didnt want followers to watch continuously?
I would never think about trying to harass or injure a bicyclist. In fact, I try to give them a wide berm even when they’re being idiots.
But I’m an observer. I have yet to see a single bicyclist signal their intentions before turning or stopping, stop at a stop sign or stop light unless there was so much cross traffic they had to, or have the common courtesy (as I do when I’m towing a trailer and can’t go the speed limit) to pull out of the way when there is a line of other traffic stacked up behind them.
Granted, the sample size is small. Most people in the northern Ohio won’t even attempt to bicycle for a good part of the year because of the weather, and nobody wants to live in the cesspool central cities where the jobs are.
And what is it with bicyclists having to use main roads? If you’re commuting, I can understand, but I see bicyclists who are obviously out for recreation or exercise on four-lane main roads with curbs and no space when there are parallel side streets with virtually no traffic. The downside of side streets is the stoplights, but since those appear to be inapplicable to bicyclists, that would seem to be a non-issue. So why is it that bicyclists feel the need to put themselves in a dangerous situation when there are alternatives?
Not to use the same example, but when I tow a trailer and have to go slow, I take as many backroads and side streets as possible so I’m not a nuisance blocking traffic. Is it unrealistic to expect bicyclists to do the same? I have every “right” to use the main roads and tie up traffic, but I don’t if I can avoid it. I certainly don’t make an effort to tie up traffic so I can demonstrate “travel trailer rights”.
Am I too late to post In Before Lame And Predictable Bicycle Haters?
I don't think it's the motorists having the trouble, Sparky.
Same here in San Antonio, Texas. It is a very rare thing to see a bicyclist comply with traffic laws. This week alone I’ve had two run stop signs right in front of me. Of over a minimum of a hundred bicyclists I’ve only seen two that actually stopped at a red light. As a motorcyclist I’m keenly aware of how we two wheelers are ignored. There’s simply no reason whatever to magnify your chances of being seriously injured. I don’t know why but most of these cyclist are very foolish.
What saddens me is she seems to have a mirror deficiency. I have a few heft issues but she thinks she is hot, given her hair dyejob.
Sure, every group has idiots, but with bicyclists nowadays, especially in urban areas, the idiots must outnumber the decent ones by a hundred to one. I’m not going to go out and run over a bicyclist though, I just have no more patience for them. It’s gotten to the point where I will yell at them like a crazy old man when I see them pulling their stunts, and I am only 33 :)
I’d hate to see what would happen if he got caught in a ‘Critical Mass’ bike ride in San Francisco. .. and
No. lol
I am pretty sure "easy" is a term in every language in the world.
Bike lanes and sidewalks solve most of the problem.
As to cyclists running through lights and ignoring stop signs, I plead guilty, sometimes. If there is a fair amount of traffic, I scrupulously obey the rules. But if there is no traffic, or the nearest car is down at the end of the next block, I sail through, for the same reason that pedestrians routinely jaywalk. People moving by muscle power tend to take the path of least resistance. This includes following the law of inertia, which means you try to keep moving, and the law of people-over-forty-not-wanting-to-jump-up-and-down-off-bicycle-seats-unnecessarily. This is an unwieldly formal name, so this principle is generally known as "Sphinx's axiom."
I once strolled through a campus with a university president, an otherwise bright guy, who started bemoaning the trail students had worn in the grass across an otherwise immaculate quadrangle. I was impertinent enough to laugh, and point out the doors of the buildings that the students were obviously traveling between. I told him that his only solution was to plant barriers, or give in and provide a landscaped path. People on foot are simply not going to take the long way around just because the President is trying to grow grass on the shortest route. I don't think he liked my answer, but I wasn't sure I really wanted the job for which I was interviewing, so I didn't much care.
>>Sorry, but I must reply - EVERY GROUP has IDIOTS! I do ride my bicycle everywhere I can and the money that I save is part of what I donate as a MONTHLY FR Donor.<<
Hey, calm down. I have purchased, used and donated bicycles at many venues. I enjoyed it (well, the uphills kind of are a problem...). When the N. Texas weather calms down (I think we’ll have a window between October 2 and November 24), I’ll be back on a bike to enjoy my area.
The same motorists who do this will fight to the death to keep anyone from impinging on their own little cul-de-sac. This is why the cul-de-sacs tend to empty onto the same jammed arterial roads; no one wants cross traffic cutting through the back way.
Suburbanites tend to have a bad case of "I've got mine; I'm pulling up the drawbridge behind me; but I'm ready to steamroller your street to add another lane."
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