all cars are just miatas with different upholstery.
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i relish the thought.
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no, all cars are minivans
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Good looking previa
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Man I just don’t get the concept of trying to start a fight with a couple on a tandem. I’m pretty sure my wife and I could beat the shit out of the average 65 year old white guy.
People are really eager to get out of their vehicles and fight me these days.
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care to elaborate?
we were riding the tandem to go get sandwiches. got routed onto a pretty busy road, but still a signed bike route with sharrows. I took the lane pretty aggressively b/c i knew we would get buzzed otherwise, so guy in a huge pickup decided to honk at us and then say some shit as he drove around. i told him to eat shit and we of course caught him at the next red light so i decided to run my mouth off, then headed on. he peeled out to get ahead of us and then pulled off to get out of his truck, at which point we were already turning into the sandwich place. he stopped a ways away and continued yelling shit out the window, but he obviously didn’t want to get in to it in front of a busy place with a bunch of people so he went on his merry way after ruining the ride for everyone.
He did my favorite, “i ride a bike too, but…”
yeah fucking right buddy.
I think i’m going to make myself a little cue sheet of non-offensive things to say when i run in to this again, but i need to think of some first, other than my usual “your mom would be disappointed with you right now”
i never had these problems in Virginia, but that’s partially because i assumed everyone would try to intimidate a cyclist was probably also armed.
was it Heinlein who said An armed society is a polite society? i no longer think that’s true, but it always gave me pause
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Try to be a little more zen than that and you’ll find that people aren’t as eager to get out of their vehicles to fight you.
Generally if someone is a raging asshole I usually just chuckle to myself about how shitty their life must be for them to get this worked up about a cyclist being in their way.
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I might suggest not evoking your antagonist’s mother. If you have trouble with your hot head this is a bad path to take - ask me how I know.
Also, if you are 100% in the right just pull out your phone and start recording.
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I really try to focus on the positive when this happens. So being grateful for still being upright. If I really can’t help myself, I thank them for sparing me. It makes me feel better and generally doesn’t make sense to the driver.
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I hope it isn’t out of line to say this, as I don’t know y’all, but: I think if you wanna get mad as hell at drivers and tell them to go fuck themselves when they endanger your life, that’s fine, but probably worth making sure that your riding companions are cool with that approach and the potential risks that come with it as well.
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I’m working on anger management with my therapist, but it’s a process. I think the part of me that hates myself and wants to die welcomes these interactions and tries to make them more confrontational.
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For sure. I struggle with how much of this is part of toxic masculinity when it comes out, and how much of it is justified rage. It’s also sometimes tough to gauge whether a given driver understands what they’ve done, sometimes, which imho makes it hard to judge whether it’s useful to try to respond more productively/less confrontationally, or whether it’ll be just as useful/feel better to just tell them to eat shit and move on with your life, ya know? Idk, either way I definitely try to adjust how I react based on my riding companions or lack thereof.
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yeah, but in my mind this is like if every time you went jogging someone tried to shoot you, or you went for a walk and someone pushed you into traffic.
esp on the tandem, these guys are putting my entire family at risk, and i dont know how not to get mad about that.
i mean i’ll try to be more “zen” about it, but i’m usually not responding this way to people just yelling shit from their cars. ideally there would be some way for them to face consequences, but it’s not like the cops are going to respond to a “this guy tried to hit me with his car, here is his plate and photo.”
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Totally. The fact that there are zero consequences for actions that effectively range from attempted assault with a deadly weapon, to negligent manslaughter, to murder as long as the perpetrator of that violence is in a car is maddening. So I think it can feel like calling them a sack of shit to their face is the worst thing they’ll ever have to deal with for this sort of thing, so might as well at the very least bring that to bear on them.
Idk I will never tell someone to be more zen about this sort of thing, just to be aware of the potential blowback and who you’re subjecting to it.
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this is a direct attack on me and i dont appreciate it.
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I agree that in a practical sense it’s good to be non-confrontational when biking, but judging by the number of drivers that are Ready To Go after you point out their shitty driving, I can only assume that they are in fact trying to kill or at least bait us.
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i’m using these people as a stand-in for the real troublesome assholes (like the ones who are ru(i)nning the US), and i think that’s why it feels so good to imagine beating the everloving shit out of them. SF is also just feeling a bit more lawless than places i’m more used to so it seems like you could get into a fist fight in the street without anyone really blinking an eye at it.
i’m using these people as a stand-in for the real troublesome assholes (like the ones who are ru(i)nning the US), and i think that’s why it feels so good to imagine beating the everloving shit out of them. SF is also just feeling a bit more lawless than places i’m more used to so it seems like you could get into a fist fight in the street without anyone really blinking an eye at it.