U.S.A. – Last week I was riding my bike and stopped at a red light when the truck in front of me started backing up. He didn’t notice me until I had moved out of the way and would have hit me if I hadn’t. I was waiting in line to go through a red traffic light, not moving, and was still nearly hit by a car.
If you’re a road cyclist there’s a very good chance you’ve had a close call with a vehicle when you were absolutely nothing wrong. Drivers get pissed at cyclists when they don’t perfectly follow the rules of the road and nearly kill cyclists when they do perfectly follow the rules of the road.
Then when a cyclist does get hit, injured, or killed by a car, the police response or headlines somehow always seem to blame the cyclist for not wearing a helmet or wearing too much black clothing. Frankly it’s absurd, and professional cyclist Phil Gaimon shared his own thoughts on the absurdity through a video shared by non-profit The White Line.
If you’re a driver who thinks this is absurd, go do an hour of biking on streets where cyclists are supposedly welcome and count how many times you’re nearly killed. Living in Denver I stick to isolated bike paths as much as possible, but I frequently encounter near-collisions while riding the one mile it takes to actually get to the path. Stop blaming the cyclist and start blaming the person in the multi-ton machine that can easily reach 80mph.