brendan
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@txgoonie 2070 wrote:
…It made me think of this thread. Perhaps, if there was a complaint it came from a pedestrian, not a driver. Would better explain the placement of the sign. I have seen lots of near misses and altercations between bikes and peds at the intersection of King St. and Union. People (often tourists) tend to amble across the street, and bikes just wanna get on through. My experience with cars, both on bike and foot, mirrors paulg. With a stop sign on every block, drivers generally aren’t in a hot hurry around there….
Slightly off topic, but my most mortifying/dangerous near miss of a pedestrian while cycling (that is entirely my own fault) was this:
A normal Saturday long loop ride out C&O (returning W&OD later in the day). Riding perhaps a tad over the 15mph limit on the Dummy, refrains of “
, ‘on the left'” for miles while passing joggers/pedestrians/other cyclists. At some point I approached a jogger going my direction plus some oncoming pedestrian traffic going the other way. When I see it isn’t really safe to pass yet, I slow down and wait – I don’t like threading the middle in general, especially not on the Dummy. So, I pulled the brake to slow down and postponed the normal and vocal notification since it’s possible I could end up behind the guy for a while. Only, I find I am not slowing down.
This is what makes the near miss my fault: I froze up for at least a few seconds. I got confused and terrified all at once before I realized that it was only my rear brake that wasn’t responding. By the time I was activating my front brake, I was inside a rather dangerous physics problem. Again, by that point I still had said nothing, because of wanting to wait for oncoming pedestrian traffic to clear before bothering the guy in front of me and now I was freaking out a bit and not sure what the next step was going to be.
It’s hard to say exactly what transpired, but while I ended up slowing down not nearly enough and got pretty close to him while passing (just after the oncoming pedestrians cleared so I couldn’t pass wide), there was no accident. I got lucky. In addition, the way the path is there, there were no bail options: water to the right and the oncoming pedestrians to the left. Once I was past him, I pulled over to the right when it was safe to do so, trembling and a bit panicked. I caught my breath and began to trace the brake problem.
As he came up from behind he said, *very* sternly, “you really have to tell pedestrians when you’re passing”. I apologized several times, said I normally do notify, told him my brakes had failed and I had panicked. I also said I was going to sort it out the brake issue before getting back on. He was angry, but rightly so, as I’d scared the crap out of both of us. I hope he believed me, I don’t want to be *that guy* in his mind forever and the cause of additional “cyclists are reckless idiots” conversations for years to come.
Since I’m off topic, I guess I might as well finish, yes?
The immediate cause of the brake failure was the adjustment knob on the outside of the Avid BB7 brakes going missing. When you pop the knob off suddenly there’s no tension on the spring and the cable pull doesn’t do anything. They are very easy to pop off by hand. I thought of going back to look for it, but talk about needle in a haystack…so, the rest of the ride was front brakes only. With front brakes and a long bike, though, that wasn’t too difficult to adjust to (plus the W&OD only has a few downhills to worry about). I ordered a couple of replacement knobs that night, and installed a replacement several days later.
Later, I was able to trace back what the proximate cause after examining the bike more closely at home. It turns out that the outer adjustment knob on the rear BB7 brakes rubs up against the left Freeloader bag on the xtracycle cargo frame when there’s a certain amount of cargo in it. I’d been keeping a 2.5 gallon water bag on the left side because the summer had been so hot and I’d run out of water on the C&O far from a good water source once before on a 100+ day. After months of rubbing, the process created a hole in the freeloader fabric. Other folks who have purchased the same setup also reported the rubbing/hole (and suggested various solutions, such as installing a metal plate protecting the knob. I ended up adding layers of reinforced duct tape on the face of the bag that can touch the knob, which conveniently “fixed” the hole too and can be refreshed from time to time cheaply.
So, in my case: at some point the edges of the hole created by the rubbing finally caught the inner lip of the adjustment knob…and pulled it off, perhaps during a big bump of some sort.
Am I just assuming that’s what happened? No, that’s the only possible explanation. Because the knob never went missing! The edges of the hole pulled the knob off the brake assembly and *into* the inner pocket of the freeloader, *where I found it three week later* when cleaning all the junk that had accumulated since the last cleaning! Doh.
Brendan
