well, he honked at me, i flipped him off, he started yelling out the window, i tried to ignore it...he cut me off/bumped his car into me, i got pissed and stomped his hood in...he got out, i tried to bike away, he chased me, tackled me and pretty much beat my ass (i had my helmet on ) all before the red light changed. i picked up a stick and broke it over his arm and side. he got back in his car and left. witnesses called the cops, got the license plate number (several cnfirmed it). when the cops finally got there (my first instinct was to NOT WAIT FOR THE COPS, which i will never do again) they ran the plates, said it belonged to a 70 year old white man (the dude was a young black male, wearing black - apparently that description isn't good enough - about so and so tall and approx weight) seems like an obvious stolen car to me, they said they weren't gonna do anything, i said "thanks a lot!" they said "yup, no problem" in an even more sarcastic tone. so i made the mistake of saying "you guys are fucking worthless, you know it?" and the two asshole pigs ran over to me and tore me off my bike, which goes crashing to the ground for the 2nd time that night (only cost about $450 no biggie) they cuff me, put me in the car, threaten taking me to jail for the whole weekend, ask to search my bookbag and i refuse which is very confusing to their small minds. finally they "let me off" with a ticket for disorderly conduct...had to go to court 3 FUCKING TIMES and miss work, all to get an ACD adjournment in contemplation of dismissal - no fine, no surcharge, just don't get in trouble for 6 months. i gotta make it to july :devil: it's shit like that, that makes me wanna scream at the top of my lungs "FUCK THE PO-LICE" oh yeah, i never got to say any of this to the judge, it was all just bullshit at court. wait for 2 hours, and see the judge for 2 mins.
just make a sign saying it, and put it on the back of your bike so that they can read it when they are behind you. It would probably give them a laugh ! I can imagine them honking the horn and giving you a cheery wave as they drive past lol
Car drivers always complain about bicylists being in the road, but riding on the sidewalk is illegal and if you do ride on the sidewalk, the pedestrians complain. Enforcing a tax on bicycles would avoid this problem, provided that the tax actually goes towards expanding roads and paving bicycle lanes.
that's true. but I think that it costs far more to make a bicycle lane per 100 yards than you imagine but the principle is correct. It's a fact that you dont have to be licensed to walk down a street, simply because being a pedestrian is the default mode of transport by which I mean, everyone is entitled to be a pedestrian and pedestrians have right of way in any dispute. Common courtesy and simple logic tells you that in any collission with a pedestrian and a vehicle the pedestrian will fare worse so vehicles have licensed drivers because cars do not have an automatic right to the street. The license ensures that drivers can be found and identified and have their rights removed for various reasons, but you cant remove a persons right to walk down a street (unless they should be in prison and have escaped etc). So licensing or taxing a bicycle will give riders even more rights to the road while removing their rights to the "side walk" (gee i'm so american now, I say "sidewalk")
I love how NOBODY in our government ever payed attention in Economics 101, let alone any of the higher level theory based classes. If you want people to do something (like ride a bike to cut down pollution, obesity, oil dependence, health care costs) then you need to incentivize it. That means making bicycles cheap, or giving a monetary benefit for riding bicycles to places (like my local co-op offers discounts for not driving to their store). Taxing bicycle ownership is the biggest step in the wrong direction the government could take if they want to encourage people to ride bicycles....but what's new? a bunch of half (at best) wits are making decisions for us.
When cars get in my way by veering too far onto my lane I shout at them, or ring my bell. When I cycle on the pavement and a pedestrian start whining to me about it I tell them to fuck off. Like what the fuck am I riding like a maniac, ploughing into old ladies and running over children? NO! I'm watching where I am going, because I'm not a fucking idiot. You can cycle a bike as slow as people walk, and apply the brakes if a child runs out in front of you, so it's the same as bloody walking the bike!!!!!!!!!!!! The way I see it is this. The space in between all the buildings is more than enough to accommodate pedestrians, bicycles and a few cars... but not too many. The fact that there are so many cars is ultimately the cause of the problem here, so any financial incentive to alleviate the problem should come from car owners, or from people who own a car on the premise that they are just too lazy to walk or cycle. Fucked if I am paying for space that's already mine in the first place, basically.. All the necessary braking and changing gears on my bike in order to navigate the centre of Edinburgh with it's traffic lights and stupid one-way system, and all the speed bumps and pot holes that I encounter all go towards wearing the parts on my bike down, and I should get money from the tax system to pay for that.
Human powered vehicles are a variation on your "default" mode of transportation. On a cycle you're using the same strength of your muscles, the same ATP burnt by your muscles, as when walking. Cars are liscensed because you use an engine with hundreds of times your strength to move dozens of times faster than you could on foot, with hundreds of times more weight than you could carry on foot. Cyclists only lose rights, not gain them, by being registered and recorded on what is basically an extended spinning pair of shoes.
