Hey Asshole! Yea You, The One Driving The Car!

If you were standing around and a car behind you blasts the horn without warning, would you be startled?  Yep!  Would you shit your pants?  Maybe!

Now imagine the same scenario, except this time you’re riding your bicycle on the street, and all of a sudden the car behind you blasts the horn. It’s not just startling but terrifying and incites a wide range of emotions.

Listen up Mister Motorist: When a cyclist is in the middle of the lane, it’s not because they hate you.  They are simply making it obvious that this lane is too narrow for you to share.  As a licensed driver, it would behoove you to understand why cyclists often can’t simply ride furthest to the right to appease you.

1. Dri­vers are com­pletely obliv­i­ous to haz­ards that cyclists need to watch out for: Door zone, pot holes, sewer grates, trash/debris on the right side, etc.
2. More often than not, lanes are not wide enough to be shared.  As a cyclist, it’s terrifying getting squeezed to the right, mere inches away from your car and the parked cars.

Only through education and a sense of personal responsibility will
cyclists and motorists ride together in harmony in the United States.

I often wonder: How lazy are asshole drivers that keep honking at me?

So there’s a cyclist, pedaling their hearts out, and you’re bitching at them because they’ve slowed you down by two seconds in your gas-powered vehicle?  Do you honk at big rigs and school buses to move out of “your” way too?  How is a cyclist any different?  Sidewalks are no place for a cyclist.  What’s worse is that these same people are often so myopic that they don’t even realize we’re both coming up to a red light anyway.  Shit for brain drivers, with their transmission in drive but their brains in neutral.

Whoever said we ‘drive cars’ and ‘ride bikes’ was obviously never a cyclist.

In a car, you’re essentially sitting comfortably, pressing a gas pedal and riding in a nice big car.  A cyclist, on the other hand, is literally moving the bike forward with the power of their legs. They are truly driving the bicycle forward with their muscles.  So relatively speaking, you’re not driving a car, as much as your English teacher would have you believe.

In conclusion, you’re a fucking asshole for honking at me.  I’m not a second class citizen and you don’t own the road anymore than anyone else.  I don’t belong on the sidewalk and if you think I do then maybe it’s time for you to take your drivers test again.  Cyclists belong on the street. They are not getting in the way of traffic, they are traffic.  Get used to it.  I hope that provides some perspective. Thanks for reading and please share this to help everyone get some perspective.

Hate my rant?  Think I’m unfair, unjust and one sided against drivers? Here’s a rant on cyclists who ride on the wrong side of the street and make up their own rules willy nilly: Hey Asshole! Yeah You, The One On The Bike!