The Ann Arbor branch of the pro-bicycle protest group Critical Mass hit the streets last Friday. I guess it’s a regular thing they do on the last Friday of every month. Anyway, I saw ’em after work. They were grouping up for their ride, I was waiting for my Wife so that we could carpool home. Honestly, I wasn’t all that impressed with them.
If you’re on a bicycle and you want to impress me, then don’t be an ass. You are a vehicle. That means you need to follow the same rules of the road. And for heaven’s sake, wear your helmet! If you’re out there with a group of thirty, forty cyclists and there’s only six helmets among you, then you’re biking with the wrong group.
Seriously, my bicycle was my main source of transportation all through college, and for a couple years afterwards. I didn’t own a car until two years or so after graduation, and even then I lived close enough to bike or walk to work. I might still be biking in if I didn’t have to cross US-23 going to and from work.
If you want to have more people biking, then get out there and protest the lack of any good bicycle bridges over the highway. Don’t clog up traffic and piss off drivers. All you’re going to do is make them lose whatever respect they might currently have for bicycles, and in an argument between a car and a bike, the car always, always wins.
Seriously, would you argue with someone who drinks gasoline and can run sixty miles an hour?