blog.eliduke.com

When it comes to riding a bicycle, I tend to be somewhat aggressive as far as “obeying traffic signals” is concerned: if they are leaning in my favor, I obey them; if they aren’t, I ignore them. Of course, I pay very close attention to cross traffic, and if I know that I’m gonna blow a red light, I look both ways before doing so. I take pride in my ability to time things just right.

This evening, not more than 15 minutes ago, I was cruising north on 25th Ave NE about to cross NE 75th St, when the light went red on me. There was a car on 75th (pointed west) waiting for his red light to turn green. I knew that he would be moving through the intersection in a matter of seconds, and sure enough, just as my light turned red, his turned green and he started to roll forward. If I continued on my current path and he continued on his, we would miss each other perfectly.

As I entered the intersection, however, he slammed on his brakes! He stopped right there in the middle of the intersection, the tail end of his car directly in my path. There was no way around him. I grabbed for the brakes and pulled as hard as I could. Unfortunately, I grabbed the front brake (the wrong brake), and went flying over the handle bars, landing on the trunk of his car.

Oops!

I slide off the car and immediately started apologizing to the driver. He was totally cool, some 30-ish white thug dude, driving a total hoopty ride with like 22-inch rims. He just told me that I need to start obeying traffic signals, and that I’m gonna flip over the handle bars every time if I keep pulling on the front brake. I told him that I was just trying to time it out perfectly. We ended the conversation with some sort of a terrorist fist jab. He rolled away.