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Stupid Cyclist Tricks
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Caution: This beverage may be hazardous to your health.
About a year and a half ago, ABC7News ran one of those "we want to hear from you" sorts of pieces in which two sides of an issue are unceremoniously laid out, side by side, for the Vox Populi to throw rocks at. In this case, the issue was whether cyclists were to blame for accidents between vehicles and bicycles (the CHP says that 60 percent of the time they are), or whether police officers skew the data by not always filing cases brought by cyclists against drivers (as the SF Bicycle Coalition charges).
My instinct and completely unscientific personal bias leads me to believe that the SF Bicycle Coalition has it right, which is not to say that I also believe cyclists to be incapable of stupidity in the saddle. I mean, I have certainly done some pretty dumb things while riding a bicycle. Permit me to bore you with my personal dumbest.
It happened one morning a couple of years ago when I was deep in the habit of stopping for coffee at Lytton Coffee Company in Palo Alto, which is probably less than a mile from where I work. There are no stop lights between Lytton and my office, just a couple of four-way stop signs and a short bridge that spans San Francisquito Creek. At the time, my routine consisted of stopping at Lytton, getting a coffee to go, climbing onto my bike, and then riding the short distance to work with one hand on the left handlebar and a cup of coffee in the other.
There are only three tricky aspects to this procedure, or so I thought before that fateful morning. The first is getting onto the bicycle with one hand. It sounds like it should be simple, but it's not, or at least it wasn't for me. The second hurdle is getting off the bicycle with one hand, which is doubly challenging since the hand doing the stopping was my left one, which means that to slow down before dismounting, I had to learn to brake gently since the left brake grips the rim of the front tire. The third tricky bit is having to stop anywhere along the way because that requires you to do tricky bits two and one all over again.
On this particular morning, the pavement was dry, the sun was shining, and I'm pretty sure birds were chirping. Someone at the coffee shop smiled at me and held the door. As I pedaled away from the curb, my head was filled with nothing but shiny, happy thoughts. The world was my friend. As I approached the first four-way stop, the car coming from the other direction came briefly to a stop and then proceeded. The man in the pickup to my right came to a full stop and, I swear on a stack of Sunset Western Garden Books, caught my eye and nodded me through, even though he clearly and obviously had the right of way. Drivers do that to cyclists all the time, especially on sunny mornings when the birds are chirping and people are opening doors for you.
I eased past the first crosswalk line, coffee cup in hand, confident that I belonged here and that within seconds I would be through the intersection on my merry way. That's when the truck to my right lurched into the intersection and I knew I was about to be hit. This was no hunch on my part. I had been hit by a car some years before, back when I lived in Seattle and thought it would be smart to make a 1967 Triumph Daytona 500—with a beautiful bronze metal-flake paint job and twin carburetors that would go out of tune if you so much as thought about going for a ride—my sole means of transportation. That time, the driver had not seen me at all, crossing two lanes of traffic to position his car between me and what just seconds before had been open rode. I hit his front-right quarter panel, went sailing over his hood, and landed in the street, which tore the mask off my helmet, laced the helmet itself with deep scratches, and ripped up my leathers pretty good. I was bruised bad by that accident and couldn't hardly move for a month, but this, I could immediately see, was going to be worse because I was wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and lacked gloves. All I could think about was my hands, and how they were about to get totally mashed.
My hands, it turns out, had other ideas. Without asking me, the right one pivoted to make sure that the liquid in the coffee cup it was holding remained perfectly level. The left one clamped down hard on the brake, which caused my rear wheel to leave the ground, me to leave my seat, and my body to make its way over my bike's handlebars and into the street.
By this time the driver of the pickup had stopped, no doubt enjoying the comedy routine unfolding before him. I can't explain how the next few seconds happened, but somehow I managed to land on my feet and, after a stumble or two, remained upright, full coffee cup victoriously in hand. I waved at the truck driver in a "don't worry about me; I'm okay" sort of way. I think he shook his head. My shin hurt and there was a small amount of blood near my ankle from contact with the handlebars, but other than that, I was fine. Which is why, lesson thoroughly unlearned, I got back on my bike and road the rest of the way to work, pretty much as if nothing had happened.
For a while I changed my routine a bit by switching hands, just to avoid the flying-over-the-handlebars thing again, but then a month or so later I gave up the practice altogether, deciding that the coffee at work was really pretty darned good if you got it when it was fresh.
So there we are, an example of a stupid act on the part of a bicyclist. Had I been hit by that pickup that day, I definitely would have fallen into the CHP's 60 percent.
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