To be a driver behind a cyclist.
Today is a bike tour rest day for Felkerino and me, and it coincided perfectly with an op-ed blowup in the Washington Post, which I am disappointed to admit is also my local paper.
Sadly, I’m sort of used to anti-cyclist, get off my road articles. However, my heart jumped when the writer of this particular piece stated that he could see why drivers would be willing to pay a fine of $500 to hit cyclists. Thanks, Washington Post. Thanks a lot.
It is terrifying to read a writer– in the Post, no less– who suggests that deliberately striking a cyclist in an act of vigilante justice or whatever reason is understandable, if not okay. It is not. This is people’s lives we are talking about here. My life. I am crying in anger and fear as I write this.
I am not cycling around to be taught a lesson by a driver who thinks it is a punishable-by-death crime for me to be on the road. Like drivers, I am just trying to get safely where I need to go, be that work, the grocery store, or dinner with friends.
I ride my bike in Washington, D.C., almost every day and it scares the s#&! out of me that there are drivers who would want to hit me because I am riding my bicycle on the road that, for many years, many drivers believed belonged to them. But times are changing, at least in the District, and while lots of people are still driving, others are turning to bicycles as their primary form of transportation.
Drivers do not own the road. The roads are ours to somehow find a way to share. We all have to figure it out because our lives depend on it.
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