Good cop delivers instant justice to driver tailgating a cyclist

You were riding a bicycle on the freeway? Holy carp! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, a Mazda 626 could never have been mistaken for a bicycle, but you know the ‘buy American’ crowd.

:wink:

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626

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Hey, you. Stop that.

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Where I live in NC, riding on the sidewalk is illegal except for specific municipalities that have voted to allow it.
It may feel safer because you’re not among the car drivers, but it isn’t. Sidewalks intersect driveways and roads a whole lot, and wherever that happens, car drivers are not expecting them to fly across. They don’t look for bicycles on sidewalks, and they don’t see them when they are present.

If you want to feel safer when bike commuting, learn how. Cycling Savvy provides excellent training on tactics and lane control. The League of American Bicyclists also provides Road Skills training, but it tends to be more general purpose and broad. Everyone thinks that they have mastered the bike after they learn how to ride it without falling down, but there’s a whole lot more to controlling it confidently in traffic.

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Yeah, anyone who ever played Paperboy knows you don’t ride on the sidewalk if you can help it.

That’s where breakdancers practice

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We get plenty of cyclists, who risk their lives to ride on some of these twisty mountain roads. I rode bikes very seriously for a long time, so I do not get bothered by the cyclists. The people who bug me are the ones who are afraid to ever pass a bike. We don’t have bike lanes, or passing lanes, or even shoulders. So if you don’t pass that bike, you are going to be following them up the mountain forever. There is rarely room to safely pass both a car and a bike, so it ends up becoming a very slow parade.
But road rage or aggressive driving are always unacceptable.

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It depends on where you live. Some places ticket speeding cyclists, some don’t. Some places have the “Idaho stop” rolling stop rule, some don’t.

Where I live, cyclists blowing through a 4-way stop blind without stopping, at the bottom of a hill, was such an issue the cops put up a speed trap with a camera and issued a press release on the stats for the duration of the trap.

Asshole drivers are definitely the most dangerous assholes on the road, but asshole cyclists have badly injured people around here – mostly people disembarking from streetcars, but sometimes pedestrians and other cyclists.

Mostly people need to stop being assholes.

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This is precisely how my husband – a longtime, hardcore bike commuter – rides. He says he just assumes that every driver is texting and/or stoned and rides with maximum paranoia.

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Well, my husband has been pulled over multiple times in Cambridge MA. Most of the time he’s able to talk his way into just a warning, but he has gotten one or two actual tickets :laughing:

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I once passed a bicyclist who was doing 120km/h uphill (he’d had a big downhill runup, and was drafting a truck) on the Pacific Highway (main road south out of Sydney).

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The few cyclists i’ve seen on freeways were ones that were going on longer trips so they were packing a bunch of gear on the bike and were going slow on the shoulder. Pretty dangerous, i know i wouldn’t want to be there.

I’ve bought cheap dashcams from dx.com for a few years now.
They work fine, just slap in an SD card and off you go. You get what you pay for of course, but I can confirm that the video files show up correctly and can be replayed. Fun to play with.
Just keep checking them now and again and replace when they fail (don’t want to need it and not have it).

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There is NEVER a reason for a car to tailgate a cyclist, regardless of speed. >:(

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I seem to have fewer problems when wearing this shirt. Not sure why, maybe the color combination is soothing?

Sounds like that famous truck-drafting scene in ‘Breaking Away’.

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When I lived in Japan (early 90s) I noticed that cyclists would only ride on the sidewalks because it would have been insane on the road. And the sidewalks are pretty crowded, certainly more than any Canadian cities. On the other hand it is a different kind of cycling than you’d see in North America, usually these are bikes to get to the nearest station. (I was always puzzled by the piles of abandoned bicycles near stations, instead of locks, they would have a metal card that prevented the wheels from turning) Also remember being impressed by the food delivery cyclists who would weave through a crowded sidewalk with one hand balancing a number of food trays.

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Nice job, Policeman! Like many people, I can sometimes be frustrated by poorly instructed cyclists, but I’d NEVER endanger them. What a tool. They’re our friends and neighbors!
The only thing I’d ever ask of a cyclist is that they obey the same rules that apply to others. Running red lights, for example, thus causing patient traffic to pass them multiple times is just wrong. It gives all cyclists a bad name.
Thank-you for allowing me to post.

To be fair, that’s exactly my assumption when I’m driving, too.

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