Riding a Bicycle Versus Driving

Apart from when it is snowing outside or when it is pouring rain, riding a bicyclye is a great and extremely effective way for getting around. But if this is the case, then why do so many motorists find cyclists to be incredibly annoying?

While riding a bicycle is an eco-friendly means to get around, many motorists struggle to share the road with their two-wheeled friends. You may be thinking, "but motorcycles have two wheels too...". The main difference between someone who is on a motorcycle versus someone who is on a bicycle is the fact that someone who is on a motorcycle is actually capable of 'driving' at a speed that is comparable to that of any of the other vehicles that it shares the road with. On the other hand, someone who is riding around on a bicycle is sharing the road with motorists but is not able to keep up with the same speed that the traffic is traveling. Often, cyclists can be seen in the far right lanes of a roadway while vehicles swerve to avoid them or frustratingly slow down as they get caught behind them.

I will never forget the time that one of my friends, a professional cyclist, recounted a story to some friends about how she had been attacked on several occasions by passing motorists who had reached the peak of their frustration. With regards to one of the incidents that she was involved in, she told us that she had been riding her bicycle along a popular road when she was hassled by a car full of twenty-somethings. They began to verbally taunt her. She ignored them, and when the light turned green, she continued on her bicycle; however, the car wound up following her. Finally, someone in the car had the idea to start throwing glass bottles at her. A couple of the glass bottles wound up hitting her, causing her to fall off of her bicycle. Not only was she injured from the broken glass, but when she fell, she fell against the curb and wound up further injuring herself. To make matters even worse, her expensive road bicycle was damaged.

As the car sped off, she scrambled to retrieve the license plate number. She ended up having to leave her bicycle where it was so that she could limp to the nearest payphone to call someone to come pick her up and take her to the hospital. What had she been doing wrong? She had been following all of the rules of the road for cyclists. She was not impeding the flow of traffic and had said nothing to the people in the car to infuriate them. However, there is a growing trend of people who dislike cyclists because they feel as if they slow down traffic and don't always obey the rules. Despite all of this, we must learn how to share the road with other people. If the law dictates that we must share the road with cyclists, and the cyclists are following the rules of sharing the roadway, then we should have no reason to fault them. Learning tolerance as a motorist is something that will go a long way to prevent unnecessary accidents or squabbles between other pedestrians and cyclists.