Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45
I did express some road rage once in my life (zero regrets), as a cyclist, and in retrospect I am pretty convinced it was worth it to teach that person a lesson, for the sake of all other cyclists he'll share the road with. Obviously no physical violence involved, just being pissed off enough (with good reasons; and he ended up agreeing).
Now that I think about it - all the times I've been actually angry on the road towards a specific other driver was as a cyclist, and that's only because my life was actually threatened.
Seems much more... normal to me that a cyclist would end up beating up a pickup truck driver with a club, after an incident that could easily have produced a major crash between the two and for which each party think the other is at fault, rather than the other way around. There's much more at stake for the cyclist.
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When you're on a bike you're pumping lots of blood, and the testosterone seems to really kick in (is that physiologically accurate?). I'm grateful to have a large swath of little-trafficked country lanes to ride on, but when I come back into town to do a "victory lap" along Lakeside Drive, a serene and pleasant stretch going by the Festival Theatre full of tourists, ducks and swans with a speed limit of 30 km/h, I sometimes encounter idiots in a frenzy to pass me in spite of the fact that I'm often going 35 km/h behind a long row of cars.
When they honk I look around and shrug my shoulders. If they honk again or yell at me to get over I'll sometimes give them the finger. If traffic comes to a stop in front of me I'll slow down, wait for the offending car to pull up alongside me, and tell them to slow down, it's just 30 km/h here, I have the right to be in the middle of the lane, etc.
This is all with tempers under control. If they argue, stupidly, that I'm supposed to get out of the way so that they can pass me, I say something like "Look, this is a slow, narrow street, you can't pass me if there's oncoming traffic, stop driving like an asshole."
I know that just escalates the anger, and could potentially escalate the situation, but I can't help it. Objectively they are being assholes, but nobody thinks of themselves as assholes, so I probably haven't convinced them that they are (at least, in that moment). Do they rationally consider the reasoning behind what I said later on when they calm down?
Some might. Most probably don't. But if more and more cyclists are out on the road, my hope is that continually encountering situations where they are forced to slow down and wait for oncoming traffic to clear before passing a cyclist will reinforce the logic of it by sheer weight of reason.
I'm...probably naive.
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