I’m pretty ticked off.
Sep.17, 2008, filed under Miscellany
Frood got doored today.
For those of you who have little to no urban cycling experience let me explain what it means to be doored and hopefully you will thus be able to avoid the high risk zone.
“Dooring” is what happens when one is riding along, cheerfully minding one’s own business (i.e. the psychotic , murderous nature of the drivers of the other vehicles on the road) when someone in a parked car opens a door right in your immediate path without looking, thus causing a collision. One is either slammed sideways into the oncoming stream of traffic by said door, or one rides straight into door (and the person getting out, if you’re lucky) and is flung either through the window or over the top, both of which can result in extremely serious injury. Getting doored is one of the worst hazards of urban cycling.
Fortunately it is easy to avoid. Ride far enough out from parked vehicles that you are outside the reach of any opening door. This may earn the ire of drivers who are completely ignorant of the risks posed by their unobservant peers, but fuck ’em. Seriously. Fuck ’em. Rule #1 of cycling, whether urban or rural: your life and your health are worth more than 30 seconds, five minutes, or even half an hour of someone else’s time. Let them wait.
Frood knows this. He’s an experienced urban cyclist. When he was hit this morning he was cycling up the outside of a line of traffic that was stuck in a jam. This is the sensible option. Riding up the outside is safer because the driver is on the outside and there is more room to manoeuvre. So what happened?
Driver is running late for work. Girlfriend is in passenger seat. While waiting at lights at the top end of Queensferry Road, just after the bridge, driver decides to jump out of car. Because, get this, the girlfriend is actually giving him a lift to work, it’s just that he’s driving. She has to carry on to her work. Driver and passenger need to swap so they do it while waiting at lights. Frood is turning right ahead, so is coming up on his outside. Driver doesn’t look before opening his door. Frood is actually parallel with his car when the door opens, and the edge of the door slashes his bar tape while sending him sideways (fortunately there was no moving traffic in that lane).
Missing chunk from finger, road rash, band new bar tape ruined, probably quite bruised. I haven’t seen him yet. Sez Frood:
“At least he was very, very apologetic as I flicked blood at him.”
It could have been so much worse.
Drivers in Edinburgh are special. Only yesterday I was overtaken by some blonde bint in a Renault Clio on the same roundabout as I was T-boned a few weeks ago. The blonde then turned left on top of me before pulling in to park in the bus stop 10 yards away, and had the gall to yell abuse at me from her window when I expressed my displeasure at nearly being squashed. I watch taxis ignoring every rule of the road they possibly can (I suspect there’s some form of cab drivers’ bingo going on) and yet they hurl invective at cyclists and say we’re all law-breaking arseholes who shouldn’t be on their roads. The buses are like brachiosaurus: massive, lumbering, and directed by a brain the size of a peanut. The amount of diesel they spill on the roads is simply shocking. The road surfaces are also worth comment: Usul, we have potholes the like of which GOD has never seen. Most of them seem to be in the cracking, bleeding, crumbling lanes of red paint that are what the Council risibly calls cycle facilities. Drivers apparently don’t understand that cyclists not only don’t like trying to bunny hop over a hole 3feet wide and a foot deep, it can be a pretty hazardous manoeuvre. I’m having to develop the skill, however, because, being ignoramuses, the drivers don’t leave me enough room to avoid these pitfalls and sometimes they’ll even cut in on me because they object to me riding in even the secondary riding position, never mind the primary.
The driver was lucky he hit Frood today, and not me. I’ve had too many close calls of late to be feeling particularly forgiving.
Bike polite my arse. I’ll start showing impeccable manners when everyone else does.
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~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
