I am officially dumbfounded! On my way home tonight, I was biking up Old Georgetown Road when I saw a police car, lights flashing, stopped ahead of me. As I approached, the police officer walked back and put his hand up to stop me. Needless to say, my first reaction was to review everything I’d done in the preceding several blocks to figure out what I’d done wrong. But when I stopped he told me that the reason he was stopped was that he had just stopped a car because the driver had cut me off. He said he was aware that I had the right to travel anywhere I wanted within the right lane of the road, and that the driver was totally at fault, but that he wanted to warn me of this dangerous driver just in case I preferred to be on the sidewalk (which he was at pains to explain I wasn’t required to be).
A police officer who actually understands the laws relating to bicyclists? And is willing to enforce them against an errant driver? Perhaps having been once hit by a police car (and had the officer threaten to give me a ticket, even though I was doing absolutely nothing wrong at the time) has made me cynical, but I definitely didn’t expect this.
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