I am going to make an old man statement here. Gen Z does not look at the road. All the drivers here fuckin suck but every college student I see in the driver’s seat is looking at their phone. I feel like I’m about to see some viral tweet about how texting while driving is self care
due to some volunteering i do i end up in contact with college-age kids a lot, and it’s kind of nuts the number of them in the 2016-2019 timeframe who just ubered everywhere. Many of them had been doing so since high school.
my trumpy father in law went on a rant about an NYC friend of his that runs an ad agency. this friend has a lot of problems with his gen z junior staff because they’re too woke and always complaining about how he says the wrong thing to the wrong person. or they’re just too sensitive. i told my father in law that it sounded like his friend was the problem, not Gen z. my brothers in law and i all work with lots of gen z and have never had these problems!
right, and then Uber jacked the prices because it turns out they were just vaporizing VC money instead of turning even the tiniest profit, so a lot of those same folks ended learning to drive on their own in their early 20s, rather than under parental supervision in high school
i know i’ve said this before but i love to patronize vc-backed businesses that lose a lot of money because there’s consumer surplus in there just waiting to be snatched up! any time someone’s willing to take a loss on something they sell me, i know i’m getting a good deal!
RIP Zume Pizza, it was great getting ~1/4 price handmade pizza delivered anywhere in Mountain View for a few years while you vaporized several hundred million of Softbank’s dollars failing to robotically make pizza
I think a shocking number of normies don’t even really consider people on bikes humans in the way they consider other road users. people I would describe as friends have shared thoughts alarmingly close to that bare concept.
add in perceived insults or inconvenience and we see how ugly it gets
real talk: anyone who rides a bike frequently on tarck interacts in some way with hundreds of other road users ever single week. even the most prolifically conflicted posters on this thread aren’t even close to perceiving everyone around them as an asshole
I was trying to take a chill ride to the park to drink some beers. I’m coasting down a hill approaching a stop sign. There is an oncoming car approaching, and there is another car behind me now that is getting pretty close and I can see in the corner of my eye is edging into the oncoming lane. There are parked cars all over the place and not enough room for all of us!!
I start waving my left arm all the place. The oncoming car pulls to the right and stops, so now the car behind me jams on the gas and pulls up right beside me.
“I wasn’t going to hit you man! I live in the neighborhood, I see you on nextdoor!”
“well I gotta take your word for it buddy!” something else about how he’s a real nice guy or something
“WELL I CAN TELL YOU I DON’T FEEL REAL SAFE RIGHT NOW!”
And away he goes ~~
Tim does have me thinking that I might be the asshole here. To leave no doubt in mind, I just stalked the guys name from the assessor page and sent him a passive aggressive nextdoor message wishing him a happy rest of his Sunday.
I truly don’t get off on this even if I come here to work through my emotions textually. But as Doug says above this guy had no conception that pulling his car right up next to a cyclist could be easily conceived as a threat!