Thursday, February 19, 2009

WHAT I HATE TODAY: Your daily dose of negative energy

Today I hate drivers who use excessive caution around bicycles. Of course, I prefer these drivers over the rude, inattentive drivers who endanger the lives of cyclists everywhere. But I don’t like drivers who wait at an intersection when I’m half a block away and could not block their path if I sprouted a jet pack.* Or drivers who pass ridiculously wide even when there’s plenty of room -- or, even worse, refuse to risk passing and creep behind me for an entire block. Some drivers wait at stop signs even when we’re traveling in parallel directions, and an accident would require that I hurl myself into their path. It might seem courteous to drive this way around bicycles. But really it’s annoying and it makes me feel guilty for holding up traffic.

*Explanatory note for Canadian readers: “Jet packs” are an American invention, originally developed in the 1960s for secret agents such as the American spy James Bond. However, with the end of the cold war in the 1990s, Americans realized a “peace dividend” as the U.S. government declassified jet pack technology and made it available to citizens. Today, nearly two in five Americans use jet packs for their daily transportation needs. (These consumer-grade jet packs have been “defanged,” of course, and unlike the military models are incapable of firing missiles, laying down oil slicks or smoke screens, or deploying grappling hooks.)

3 comments:

  1. Lawrence, the ones who stay behind you all the way don't do it 'cause they risk passing, it's 'cause they want to stare at your butt!

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  2. I had a Canadian Standoff* the other night with a dude at the four way stop sign of a very small intersection. I was waiting to go straight, and he was to my right, waiting. After much wild gesticulating on my part suggesting that he either hang his ass out the window and drop a deuce or merely proceed through the intersection, he then… turned right. Nine minutes of us trying to figure out what the other is about to do, and the more intelligent of the two being at a disadvantage due to him being behind a large sheet of glass with spotlights in front of it, further compounded by his apparently having just run slap out of blinkerfluid.

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