Of course this is not meant as a how-to, just a heads up for my fellow bicyclists and drivers.
“Cyclists are in the right 70% of the time, but in the end they always lose.”
There have been many times when I’ve been hit, or a near miss, and it’s one hundred percent the fault of the driver. The problem is, if I don’t realize what’s about to happen and do something, I’m the one who is going to end of getting seriously hurt or killed. The car is maybe going to get scratched. It’s so important to be totally on your game when biking.
I had an incident about a month ago where a driver in an SUV buzzed me with about 10 inches to spare at 45 mph on a 25 mph residential street, and was going so fast the car coming head-on to him blared on his horn. I followed the guy to his house and confronted him, telling him about the three-foot LAW in Illinois, at which point he got belligerent with me, screaming about how he gave me plenty of space and how I “never stop at stop signs.” I calmly said he doesn’t know how I ride and that there wasn’t a stop sign anywhere near where he almost hit me, and he launched into a tirade about how he purposely tries to run down cyclists when he sees them going through stop signs.
At that point I told him he’s an inconsiderate prick who’s going to get someone killed, took down his plates and address and went home to file a police report. When they arrived to take my statement they gave me my options, but instead of sticking it to him and issuing a citizen’s ticket (which would require me to show up in court), I let him off the hook and just had the officer give him a warning. I took the high road, and hopefully he learned a lesson.
