[Sust-mar] Cars & bikes

[Terry Mulcahy]

Here is a CBC News story that deals with a cyclist and a car driver who got into a violent shoving match in Kensington Market, Toronto:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/01/31/toronto-fightphotos060131.html

The pictures referred to in the CBC story shows several problems, some of them appear to be criminal:

http://www.citynoise.org/article/2770

1) The pictures show a man attacking a woman. The man is larger than the woman, and the woman is on her bike warding off an attack. The man is later shown stomping her bike.
2) Another pic shows standers by having to intervene by pulling the man off of the woman.

As a cyclist, I religiously follow these rules when I deal with car drivers:
1) Limit interactions with car drivers to "rules of the road" hand signals. 
2) Own and use a loud bicycle horn to get the attention of car drivers. Mountain Equipment Co-op sells one kind that makes an ear splitting "blat."
3) Avoid negative interactions with a car driver as this will only distract the driver and potentially make a bad situation worse. This is especially true if you land a "live one" as the pictures show.
4) Report reckless or negligent car driving to the police general, non-emergency number. Time permitting, they may investigate your complaint, often as an exercise in driver education, if you give a plate no. and brief details.
 
I have "been there & done that" with most types of car-bicycle interactions. Consequently, I stick to items 1 thru 4 above when dealing with car drivers.

}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{
Terry Mulcahy
PO Box 425
23 George Street
Sydney, NS
Canada B1P 6H2

Murphy's First Law:
If anything can go wrong, it will
MacGillicuddy's Corollary: At the most inopportune time
Murphy's Second Law:
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse 
}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.web.net/pipermail/sust-mar/attachments/20060201/d3cfc23e/attachment.htm>