Today A Car Hit Me–Intentionally
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Today I was biking in later than usual due to a dentist’s appointment.
My normal route takes me along the Reflecting Pool, past the World War II Memorial, where I take the path down to the lock house where I cross 17th and Constitution. To me, this intersection is notorious. For whatever reason cars making the turn have divested themselves of the usual DC driver’s attitude towards crosswalks, that they are optional and a proving ground for asymmetrical power relationships. Instead, many of the cars making that turn have a “no way in hell am I stopping attitude”.
So, for that reason I’m normally very cautious. I slow, even stop at the lip of the curb and clearly indicate my intention to cross and, if need be, let a seemingly impatient or inattentive driver do what he’s going to do.
Today I slowed, then stopped at the crosswalk. I let one car preparing to turn go and then, at about 10:10 am, entered the crosswalk.
I was perhaps one and a half bike lengths into it when a car which has been stopped behind the car I let go first suddenly gunned it, nearly turning into my back wheel and laid on his horn.
What. The. Hell.
I immediately unclipped and swung the bike around, effectively blocking the vehicle.
I pulled the muffler from around my lower face and the conversation ran like this:
“What? It’s a CROSSWALK”
Behind the glass the driver, a late middle-aged white guy wearing a fleece cap, angrily mouthed at me, gesturing that he wanted to turn, which apparently trumped everything.
“I was in the cross walk BEFORE you”
The driver continued to shout and gestured dismissively. Apparently he had important things to do, or, at least, far more important than me going through a crosswalk in a safe manner.
I yelled at him: “Well, maybe if you weren’t such an ASSHOLE we wouldn’t be wasting time like this!”
Now, I have to give props to this aging sedan driver. He played it perfectly. He held up his hands apologetically. Although I doubted his sincerity, I thought I made my point.
No sooner had I swung my bike back around, almost clipped into the left pedal so I could throw my leg over, he gunned it, catching my back wheel and causing the bike to slice under me, knocking me off my feet. The engine roared, I felt the contact and the next thing I knew, I was watching his front driver’s side wheel passing six inches from my head.
Totally suckered. I swear: He literally waited until my back was turned.
Then he took off. I scrambled to right the bike and chase after him, but as luck would have it, the light further down 17th street was green and he got clean away. I’m not sure if the light was red if he would have stopped.
Don’t believe it? Yeah, well, even as I write this, I still don’t believe how quickly and easily some Washington DC driver graduated from being an inconsiderate prick to a hit-and-run felon.
On reflection, there are a few things I will do, anticipating the next incident, and you can be sure there will be one:
1. I was too fixated on t he driver to really remember the make and model of the car, let alone the license plate. All I know is it was a late-model sedan, in that weird metallic mauve color. In the future, I will take special pains to note the license number.
2. For that purpose, I have an Oregon Scientific helmet cam that I used to wear. It’s coming out of storage because I’m sure some people on the forum either think I did too much to provoke the driver, or didn’t do enough to provoke him into nearly running me down (and so therefore it didn’t happen). From my own experience and other’s, I wouldn’t waste my breath telling the cops about this without a flight data recording of the incident.
3. Back when I rode a motorcycle I carried 6 oz lead fishing weights in my tank bag. Time to start carrying them again. You can string them from the hole that runs through them, securing them to the handlebars with twine that will hold them in place, but is easily broken if tugged. You can figure out what they’re for.
Now, I can anticipate some of the responses of people on this forum, especially the one’s so concerned about “bad apple” bicyclists who think everything will be hugs and bunnies between motorists and us if we just manage to enforce a 100% good- biker-all-the-time policy.
First, I’m not a “bad apple” biker. Bad ass, maybe (insert wink here), but not bad apple. I stop at read lights. I make my intentions clear. I give right of way. I’m kind to pedestrians. At night I’m lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
I also bike all-season, rain, sleek or snow and deserve common decency and respect because, most of the time, I give it.
Now responses:
1. You’re too confrontational.As I said, I deserve respect. If someone is unwilling to respect me, then they can fear me, occassional forays into getting run the hell over notwithstanding. My mistake in this instance was giving the motorist benefit of the doubt for not being a yellow bastard whose courage came from 4 wheels and a chassis. I wasn’t seeking confrontation, but this motorist was. Or, at least, thought he could have it his way without consequences.
That’s what situationally sociopathic human sphincters count on: That they can do their thing while everyone else is too timid to do anything but just let it happen.
You, however, as a bicyclist — and a human being — can be as cowardly as you want while I do the work in the trenches you will benefit from.
2. You escalated the situation.
Again, I hope you find the level of abject, pants-pissing submission and appeasement that works for you. But, as I indicated in a response to another thread, some motorists just don’t like bicyclists and don’t really need a reason for thinking its their road and you have no right to it. So you can try to bike in a certain way, and then give up biking entirely until the only thing that’s bothering the people who are bothered is your very existence.
Ultimately, you can become eligible for a posthumous Neville Chamberlain award for superior appeasement.
3. You just made the whole thing up and/or it didn’t happen that way.
Well, all that tells me is that, despite posting on the WABA forum, you don’t bike in DC much.
Aside from all that, I don’t really have much of a larger lesson to extrapolate from this, except that due to politics or the economy or the gravitational forces of the moon, drivers might be more ugly than usual. Or maybe they’ve always been that way. Something in the dynamic is wrapped up in the American fixation with status and power and kicking anyone perceived as weaker or more vulnerable.
Most importantly, it’s worth keeping in mind that half the people you deal with in any situation are, by definition, below average intelligence.
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@CCrew 1822 wrote:
Oh yeah. I have 4 cars, but I’ve heard that one so many times I’m just pre-emptive and throw it out first
Well, with all undue respect to Sigmund Freud and everything he was utterly wrong about, sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.
My bicycle isn’t a vehicle. More is tied up in it. For me, biking is a challenge and a discipline. Which is why I not only bike all season and in all weather: That’s the point. Sure, it’s exercise, but it also carries me out of the mundane and makes for a little daily mini-adventure. I know some people think they’re “saving the planet”. In fact, that was the grating chant on the one DC Critical Masshole ride I ever participated in “Ride a bike! Save the Planet!”, said in exactly the same tone as Gerald Broflovski in the South Park episode “Smug”, just without overt smelling of their own farts.
Similarly, cars are an overt status symbol and a way for otherwise unimaginative people to tell others “who they are”. A couple years ago I had a 17 year old Toyota that I bought new and was basically running into the ground. It was never a beater, never failed to start or ever broke down until it gave it all up in a massive piston rod throw. Anyway, I dated a girl a couple of times who took it on herself to announce “If we’re going to date, you’ve got to get a new car”. For which I was thankful: The car allowed me to find out who she was without wasting too much time.
Also, let’s face it: Cars are two tons of armor on wheels. Imagine this: Someone steps in front of someone in a cross walk, which makes the person who was stepped in front of make the point of stepping in front at the next crosswalk, and on it goes, until the pedestrians start cursing at each other and flipping the finger. That never happens. But put them in a car, and it’s commonplace. Not only are cars status, but they allow people to vent hostility in a way that reduces personal risk to themselves. That is, in a cowardly sort of manner.
So, when bikes and cars intersect, there’s a weird dynamic. The guy in the car thinks he’s one up on the bike, because, after all, he has a car. What’s more, he’s protected, and if he’s the sort of sociopath/narcissist that’s so common in DC, not getting respect from someone he thinks, by definition, is beneath him is really going to burr his ass. What’s more, on a certain level the car driver must also be aware that, in this instance, he’s outside the adventure that is biking. Yeah, he’s got a car, but it’s mundane. He knows he lacks the discipline, physical prowess and increasingly necessary courage to be a cyclist in a car culture. So, that’s all the more reason for the car driver to want to put the cyclist down.
Personally, I think it’s a measure of how pathological we are as a society that something as simple as biking vs motoring has all these undercurrents of money, power, status, hate, repressed eroticism and resentment.
No, I believe it was Mr. Blacknell who wanted to throw you into oncoming traffic. He probably knows you better.
I had my own near death experience not augmented by hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals but rather with a bike and car so I would not wish that on anyone except a particular cyclist who decided standing on his brakes was a good strategy when I was about three feet off his rear wheel two weeks ago. But I digress… When the POS car flattened me and I was looking up at its undercarriage I had the irrational thought, “Dear God, I’ve always owned lousy cars, driven lousy cars and ridden around in my friends’ lousy cars. Couldn’t I at least be hit by a Porsche?”
@acc 1868 wrote:
No, I believe it was Mr. Blacknell who wanted to throw you into oncoming traffic. He probably knows you better.
I had my own near death experience not augmented by hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals but rather with a bike and car so I would not wish that on anyone except a particular cyclist who decided standing on his brakes was a good strategy when I was about three feet off his rear wheel two weeks ago. But I digress… When the POS car flattened me and I was looking up at its undercarriage I had the irrational thought, “Dear God, I’ve always owned lousy cars, driven lousy cars and ridden around in my friends’ lousy cars. Couldn’t I at least be hit by a Porsche?”
Which is another way of saying you’re a hippie? Well, a hippie into status when it comes to being run over, anyway.
And
1. I may be wrong, but I get the impression Mr Blacknell should be doing more commenting on UnSuckDCMetro this time of year, and
2. No one knows me, and I like it that way.
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