Most motorways now feature signs letting us know we are to share the road with bicyclists. Fair enough. But do I have to share the road with an idiot. That is a bicyclist who seems intent on suicide.
OK, here’s what you need to know, I own a class A motor home. It uses a lot of the roadway. It is roadway I am allowed to use. It is roadway, which I do not exceed by using either too much width or length. But is roadway that I use to its full extent.
A bicyclist uses the road way with an approximately an area of two feet by six or seven feet. My vehicle is larger than the average bicycle. It is also slightly more difficult to fit into the assigned area. Vehicles such as cars and trucks also fit into this “larger size” category.
So why is it some bicyclists, I’m not saying all here, want to pedal their vehicles in or vary close to the main roadway. I am speaking about the ones who seem to ignore the fact that just to their right is a paved shoulder of eight to ten feet. Riding on which, as far to the right as possible, would probably increase the likelihood of living on this planet to a nice old age by a factor close to one hundred percent.
Here is my story. This past July I was driving my motor home on a trip up the north shore of Lake Superior on Highway 61. On a couple of separate occasions I had to move my motor home across the center line to avoid it hitting a bicyclist who was riding on the fog line on the main roadway. The fog line is the white stripe that marks the edge of the roadway, to the left of this line is the driving lanes to the right the shoulder. In these instances the shoulder to the right of the bicyclist was paved. A nice layer of asphalt roughly eight to ten feet wide.
Most of the time I was lucky with no one approaching in the on coming lane. One time however there was. I immediately slowed down to try and let the on coming car go by before I had to cross the centerline to avoid the bicycle in my lane. The on coming car seeing a problem also slowed down. The driver of the on coming car also in his wisdom decided to use the shoulder on that side of the road in order that I might be able to move over just enough into the on coming lane to squeeze by the person on the bicycle.
It worked. The person on the bicycle riding in the main drive lane on Highway 61 is still alive. That is unless some one else wasn’t as lucky and was unable to move their vehicle over to avoid the bicycle.
When I had passed the bicycle and looked back in the rear view mirror I was greeted with the view of the bicyclist sitting up on the seat, arm raised with middle finger extended. After just saving his life, and avoiding a head on collision which would have taken a couple of lives, I had an extremely hard time resisting the urge to go back and run him over.
No jury would have convicted me.
