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Turn the knob to 11
Who Dat?
- Tim
- Old road racers don't stop, they just get on single speeds... and drink coffee. Lots of coffee and breves. To avoid expensive therapy and to work on my creative writing, I'll be posting various thoughts here.
2 comments:
This is about the 5th or 6th time I've seen this video posted somewhere.
There's a flaw in their thinking, though. They instruct us to count a specific action, then they ask us about something completely unrelated to that action. The results would be the same if they were to ask us ahead of time to look for that action, then afterwards ask how many times they passed the ball. Driving a car is not like that. Drivers are not concentrating on one specific aspect of driving. If they did, there's be way more accidents than there already are.
The video makers also did something that a cyclist shouldn't do: they essentially camouflaged the second action. You know as well as I do that one of the best ways to stay alive as a cyclist is to make sure one is visible to motor vehicles. To me, that means making sure my bike has lights on it in low-light conditions, and taking up as much of the lane as I safely can. If I were to ride like the bear, I'm sure I'd have been hit by now. As it is, it's rare that I even get honked at. Having lived & ridden in this area, you know how rare that is.
Yes, I agree that drivers should be more aware of their surroundings, and should hang up that damn cell phone and stop sending text messages. But cyclists should be responsible for their own safety, too. They should make sure they're visible, and they should ride intelligently.
My dad had some sage advice for staying alive in traffic: "Pretend like you are invisible." I wish it were that easy. Many drivers seem to tense up and don't know how to behave when there is a cyclist nearby. One day last summer on my commute home on a path, I had a woman slam on her brakes and dump her coffee all over her dash when she saw me out of the corner of her eye waiting to cross. I was just sitting there looking at her. If I had been invisible she could have enjoyed her beverage.
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