Being nice to each other as we share common space
It’s always when I’m hurrying that things seem to go wrong. When I’m trucking along trying to make the light before it turns red, squeaking through on a yellow; when I’m trying to make it to the corner before the pedestrian so that I don’t have to stop for her;…
Along with being awesome for its own sake, nice weather is fun for how many people it brings out, many of whom are getting places on their bikes or on foot. Of course, this means that a lot more people are trying to inhabit the same space that mere months…
I’m trying to figure this out. Earlier this week, I was hustling from work to a board meeting for the Hollywood Farmers Market, trying to navigate the other hordes of cyclists who also head north on Williams during evening commute time (geez! I had no idea so many people biked…
For a long time, I’ve had bike bell envy. My handlebars–both the ones that were stolen and the new ones I got to replace them–are super thick, and I’ve never yet found a bell mount that fits around them. So while people cheerily dinged their bells on the Eastbank Esplanade,…
One of the teens I work with was hit by a car last week. He was walking across a street in NE Portland. And as he crossed, he had just enough time to make eye contact with a driver speeding toward him before he jumped, smashed into the windshield and…
It was a kind of crazy evil magic: where there had been four people biking, suddenly there was one person with a clipped back tire, another one on the ground, and the two of us skidding to a stop to make sure everything was okay. We’d been biking down the…
If someone’s going to do something potentially dangerous that can affect other people, I’d like to know that that person has been adequately taught and tested. If a doctor is going to do surgery, for example, I want her to have gone through a whole bunch of training beforehand, and…
Whenever I see a biker stopped on the side of the road, or walking their bike down the street, or bending down around some imperceptible thing on their chain, or really doing anything at all that seems like it might portend something bad for the rest of their commute, I…
I’ve been on a mission, lately, to stop for every pedestrian I see trying to cross the road. It’s easy when I’m the only one around, but I’m a little more reluctant when there are cars behind me and I worry that: the car might not stop when I do…
This may be my own opinion more than any cultural norm or hard rule or anything, but when you’re biking, I think it’s flat-out rude to blow by someone else without some form of acknowledgment. It doesn’t need to be huge–a simple “on your left” or ring of a bell…