Had a bit of a scare on my #ebike #bicycle yesterday from a #carbrain fool. I was riding on the edge of the lane on a striped street in a (my) residential neighborhood, on my way downtown to grocery shopping and a Selectboard meeting. I was in assist level 3/4 on flat ground, so I was doing between 17-20 mph (speed limit 25).
A woman approached me from behind in a Chrysler 300, close-passed me (VT law: 4 ft), rolled down her passenger side window, and screamed at me. #BikeTooter #FediBike
I believe what she screamed at me was something to effect that I should be using the bike lane, and not the street.
Reader, there is no bike lane on this street. It's a residential neighborhood street, the one at right in the Google Maps aerial view below. It's striped, and the shoulders are filled with debris, because this is VT at the tail end of Winter.
That wasn't the scary part. About 100 yards later, she came to a stop in the street in front of me, and began to turn around.
When a driver behaves in that manner, you have no idea what their intentions are, or what they are about to do, but you have a reasonable belief that they intend to harm you.
The hilarious part about this is that her arrogant belief that I impeded her travel in anyway amounted to, at most, a few seconds of additional travel time.
As I said, this lasted no more than a couple of hundred yards from when she approached me from the rear, passed me, and came to a stop in the street ahead of me.
@gcvsa one of the scary things about a car dependent society is that you almost have to let people drive, even if they don’t have the temperament to do it responsibly.
If we had the right infrastructure, it would be much easier to just take the keys away from people like this. Chill out and take the bus, lady.
@famousringo If we had the right infrastructure, this would never have been a problem, to begin with, because there would be a protected bicycle lane on that street.
Again, while it is a residential street, it is an semi-arterial route from the center of town to the South end of town (which includes two industrial areas, and thus heavy trucking), and because it is particularly wide, people feel free to exceed the speed limit regularly.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
famousringo