Quote:
Originally posted by dd74
I don't know about you guys, but the last people on two wheels I'd wanna' piss off are on race bicycles. They eventually do catch up to a car in traffic (usually at stoplights), have those nasty pedal clips at the bottom of their shoes, and are already pissed off at traffic.
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One of my co-workers is a very avid road cyclist - he races pretty much every weekend and trains daily. He's shared a number of horror stories about vehicular idiocy. Most recently their team was practicing intervals along a long, untrafficked stretch of road at about 5:30 in the morning. 30 or 40 bikes hammering along at 30-ish MPH. A solitary brand-new 6-series BMW passed them in the left lanes (it was two lanes each way with a divider down the middle), so the driver obviously saw the pack of cyclists. Apparently she realized she was going the opposite direction from the one she wanted to go, so as she got to a cutout in the divider to make a U-turn she swung RIGHT (into the right lane) directly into four cyclists before cutting her U-turn back the other way. One guy ended up breaking a collarbone and shredding his arm, my friend got banged up pretty good (lots of bruises), another guy went over the car and broke his wrist on landing. Two $5,000+ bikes were totalled (this is a sponsored race team) with damage to the others. The woman just plowed along the opposite way like nothing ever happened. Fortunately the riders behind them (that she'd passed) saw all this and chased her down, detaining her until the cops came.
(This is the best part)
Cops showed up and said, "well, there isn't enough injury here, so we're not going to cite you" and sent her on her merry way. Municipality? Santa Monica. Some guys from the cycling club are researching it and they're pretty sure she's the wife of some prominent city attorney or something.
Crap like this happens all the time. This is just one example.