Posted on 04/13/2018 9:05:51 AM PDT by bgill
When JoJo McKibben was the victim of a hit-and-run on April 3 as she biked to work, she wasn't all that surprised. She was hit while biking by a drunk driver last summer and has come to expect that cars won't realize she's riding on two wheels. McKibben's boyfriend Brendan Sharpe said he has also been seriously injured by cars while he's biked in Austin, once in 2009 and again in 2015... Katie Delleoz, the executive director of Bike Austin, said she personally has nearly been struck at the same intersection McKibben was hit at last week
(Excerpt) Read more at kxan.com ...
Out here in the country, we have idiots who come out from Austin to ride their bikes on hilly curvy little one lane roads. Vehicles coming around corners are constantly having to slam on their breaks to avoid plowing into them as they struggle to peddle ever so slowly up hill. There are no bike lanes like in the city so they're right there in the middle of the road. Of course, it will be the driver who will be charged if/when something bad happens.
How many “cars” have been injured by bicycles?
It should be legal to run over bicyclists. There’s a reason God invented the internal combustion engine. And why aren’t they paying registration fees and required to have insurance?
"...they WILL be run over..."
Jeez get a clue. Austin, it figures.
Where I live, it seems like 9/10 bicyclists routinely run red lights and stop signs, and they pay no attention to oncoming traffic OR pedestrians.
"...It should be legal to run over bicyclists..."
How many “cars” have been injured by bicycles?
And I was hit four times, but I never went down. And to your point, the cars were all damaged, one pretty bad. They were all the same kind of accident. I’m in the bike lane and a car takes a right, without signalling, with me smashing into the side of their car. The reason I never went down was because I am always watching for that sort of thing and have learned to hit the car and then ride it around the corner. I did kinda catch my arm on a passenger side mirror in one of those. It hurt a bit and ripped the mirror off the car.
I never had any other kind of accident because I was always watching for oncoming cars to make left turns in front of me and stuff like that. I always had an exit route.
BTW, I don’t really ride much any more. I stopped commuting by bike back around 2007. Cell phones and texting made it WAY too dangerous.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I decided to ride my bicycle for fun and exercise and on my first ride on the main streets found that drivers were deliberately trying to see how close they could come to me, I quite riding on the spot.
Why anyone would continue a sport so dangerous as to ride on the street with cars after they had already had an accident is beyond stupid.
“How many cars have been injured by bicycles?” Count me as one. I was in Colorado Springs and a bicyclist rammed into the rear of my car, put a great big dent in the trunk (it was a rental). He hot-footed out of there. Fortunately, after removing the liner of the trunk lid the dent popped back into place and the rental company was none the wiser.
As a pedestrian in city traffic, crossing legally at an intersection, I came within inches of being clobbered by an idiot cyclist who didn’t think that the red light applied to him. People have been killed that way. I was lucky.
I really don’t understand why it’s legal for bikes to be on any roadway. As we all know, roads have a legal maximum speed, the “speed limit”. But most roads also have a legal minimum speed, weather permitting. That minimum speed often 15 mph below the maximum speed.
So if it not okay for a car to putter along at 10 mph, why is it okay for a cyclist to do so?
I used to drive to work in downtown Manhattan. You have to watch out for bikes coming the wrong way on a one-way street or zipping through red lights, as well as pedestrians stepping out into the street in front of you in the middle of the block without a crosswalk ALL THE TIME.
Not only do you get blamed, fined, or jailed for running over one of those idiots, it would really be no fun running someone over. And you’d have to stop your car and stay there, blocking up traffic while angry drivers call you an idiot, until the police came and finished questioning you for about six hours.
So, watch out for crazy bikers!
"...bicyclists insist on being equal with cars in the road..."
I like it when they wear their ear buds and you KNOW they cannot hear traffic or anything else. STOOOOPID
Where I live, it seems like 9/10 bicyclists routinely run...stop signs, and they pay no attention to oncoming traffic OR pedestrians.
Part of the problem is that there are plenty of stop signs that appear in areas where traffic is light and you can see a long ways down the road to both sides. Stopping at the stop sign is nothing more than a formality. In a car, it’s fine. It doesn’t cost you much. On a bike, it scrubs off speed that took a lot of energy to achieve and to re-achieve. If there was a “real” reason to stop, that would be different. But for a stop sign where there is OBVIOUSLY nothing to actually stop for, other than the sign, the only logical reason for stopping is that there is a cop around. The reason for the sign is that if there IS traffic approaching, on both roads, it lets everyone know who has the right of way.
And if I had my way, all stop signs would be replaced by yield signs. All of ‘em. Of course, it means the public would need to be “retrained” in the concept that the car approaching from the right at a four way intersection with no signage has the right of way.
Iknow this is a drunk driver hits a bike thread, but I agree with you. Texting and driving are out of control. I see people every day looking at their phones instead of the road. Of course its illegal here in maryland, but the people show up and court and get pbj instead of the automatic 250$ fine it should be.I think cops should arrest people driving and texting. pull the driver over, have the cartowed, spend the night in jail until you can post a 500$ cash bail.. You’ll get it back when you show up in court..
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