Jimellow

I was out riding earlier and during the ride up a gradual and reasonably steep hill, a passing car beeped at me. Not the "Heads up, I'm here" beep, but the "Hey asshole, get off the road!" type of beep. It was a two lane road (one lane each direction), and not heavily trafficked. I was hugging the white line/shoulder as well as I could without risking falling off, and the road runs through an area heavily populated by boats, bikers, and people doing leisurely things. In other words, it wasn't a highway.

I'm a very laid back guy, but I flipped the driver off, and upon seeing this in the rearview mirror, the driver stopped the car up the road. I sped up my pedaling pace towards the car, but the driver ultimately drove off without further incident. Flipping him off was a bad idea, I acknowledge that. We all do stupid things at the spur of the moment, and this was one of those things, but I don't think I'm wrong in feeling that the move made by the driver was very brash and inconsiderate.

I don't really understand why some people are so inconsiderate when it comes to sharing the road with bicycles. Throughout the course of my ride today, I probably had fifty to sixty cars pass me at some point without incident, but the one that did was on the road I would suspect to be least likely of such inconsideration. At the time of the incident, the road was empty, literally. There was another biker about 500 yards behind me, and another half a mile up, already cresting the hill. There were no cars and the beeper could easily have gone around me without incident. It's a sweeping, and wide, road and of the roads I was on today, it was easily the least cramped of the bunch.

As someone that enjoys to think things through and ponder, I am curious about why some drivers are so reluctant to share the road with bicyclists. It's difficult enough to hug the white line without ditching your bike off the shoulder, and all the bikers I've seen while driving my car or bike have made the best effort possible to stay near the shoulder and not drive in the middle of the road near traffic. Yet, despite this, it seems car drivers often don't respect, or even acknowledge the presence of bicyclists on the road.

In Pennsylvania, most roads have minimal consideration for bicyclists in the first place. The shoulder is often miniscule, thus putting riders in a dangerous position on the road, and due to the nature of traffic, the shoulders are often filled with glass and other debris that makes riding there hazardous at times. Just yesterday I blew out a tire as a result of riding on the shoulder, but at least such incidents are expected given the nature of debris being pushed to the shoulder throughout the course of heavy traffic. The inconsideration of some car drivers is what I don't really understand, especially given that it doesn't seem like a lot to ask to share the road with someone that is fully exposed to the environment and doing the best they can to not get killed in the process of going for a ride.

__________________
Desperation is no excuse for lowering one's standards.