Oy oy.
Anyone who rides downtown eventually has a run in with a car. Mine was this morning. No contact was made, but it was damn close.
I had warmed down and was just soft pedalling along the sidewalk at 15th and Constitution about a block away from my office. I waited for the walk signal, looked to my right to make sure no-one was running the light, saw no-one there and proceeded across. As I'm approaching the middle of the street, I hear a honk to my right. A guy was running the red light almost 10 seconds after the light turned red. I know it was almost 10 seconds because the crosswalk counter had counted them down.
It seemed like he missed me by inches. My honest guess is that he was actually about 2 feet away from me. He was drinking coffee and honking the horn as he drove around the corner.
I was more than a little pissed off at this. I know that I can't really do anything about it, but I figured I'd follow the guy and see if I could talk to him. I really wanted to yell at him for driving like an idiot, but I know that won't do much good. Adrenalin kicked in very quickly and before I knew it I was in the big ring, out of the saddle and sprinting up 15th street after him.
The good news: My big ring still works after all these years. Today it was not just cosmetic. :D
More good news: It only took me six blocks to catch up to the guy.
Even more good news: My head had cooled down by the time I pulled up to his half open window. I just calmly asked him nicely to be a little more careful when turning left. I calmly told him that he almost killed me. He freaked out a little and said a lot of stuff that I didn't understand. At least he put his coffee down to talk.
The best news of all: Just before the light was going to turn green, I was getting ready to turn back and head down to my office again, a DC Policeman on a bicycle rode up and told me, "I'll take it from here, son". He told the guy to pull to the side and gave him a ticket.
As it turns out, the cop was most of the way up the block between Constitution and Pennsylvania when he saw the guy almost run me down. I was so hellbent on catching the guy in the car and being as safe as possible (I broke no traffic laws that I'm aware of) that I didn't see him follow me up the street. I think he was originally afraid that I was going to wail on the guy or something. He seemed pleasantly suprised that I was talking in such a civil manner with him.
Oh well. It sounded more dramatic in the subject, didn't it?
Happy trails.
Pete
2 comments:
i wish that i could always maintain a more calm demeanor, not just sometimes. good for you, really, you could have pulled a godzilla and put your u-lock thru his window.
It is really tempting to do that. The problem is that since this is a daily commute, there's a REALLY good chance that I'm gonna see this guy many times per week. Any asshole moves that I make would just put a big huge target on my.
Hopefully the guy getting a ticket didn't already piss him off.
Had I managed to catch him in 2 blocks, I might not have been so cool about it. Having chased like hell, I burned off a lot of aggression and let myself cool down.
Pete
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