Less than a week left to enter your badass bike vs. car stories to drinkwaterrobert@hotmail.com for the contest. Here are a few more that came in…
Greg Hendricks offers a poem on the battle between cars and bikes..
They have horns,
I have bells.
My breath is ‘Winterfresh’!
Their exhaust, it smells.
Reflections in their mirrors
Reflectors on my shoe.
While they burn fossil fuels
My thighs are burning too.
A mere five gears is what they have
But I’ve got twenty-four.
My pedals, they go round and round
Theirs just go to the floor.
Their heaters keep them nice and warm
I’m kept warm by MEC.
They get to work in 20 minutes
I’m only slower by a sec.
They hunker down in traffic snarls
I whiz by them on the right.
They might develop ‘road-rage’
Fatigue’s my only fight.
Air-bags will protect their noggins
A helmet’s all I’ve got.
y body’s slowly getting fitter
While theirs just goes to pot.
So many perks to the bike commute
And I’m choosing here to boast.
But once it snows and hits -40
I know that I’ll be toast.
An anonymous cyclist shows us that you’d better be careful who you get badass with…
In downtown Calgary, while working as a courrier, I was clipped by a mercedes convertible driven by a grey-haired, cell-phone talking, sunglasses-wearing, no-look-lane-changing prince of a fellow. Due to luck more than to anything else [I didn't see him coming], I stayed up and squeezed against a curb as I hit the brakes and let him go by. I may have exchanged some form of witty pleasantry — I’m not sure. But as I pass him on the driver’s side, I note that HE is yelling at ME!
He is left behind at the next red light, and I start trying to figure out why he was yelling at me. I believe he was either just angry that I was on the road in the first place, or perhaps he thought that I was somehow at fault, or maybe he just lost a big case, or maybe he was off his meds, or maybe he was born with this personality. I turn down an alley, and I hear an engine revving behind me, tires squealing, and I pull to the side to let some wannabe racer pass me without getting clipped yet again. The car keeps speeding up, and I stop behind a concrete post because, holy s&*#, this guy must be in a hurry. The car locks the brakes and slides to a sideways stop just in past me. It’s the same guy.
He starts SCREAMING at me and gets out of the car with his hand in his inner suit pocket. I’m still on my bike so I ride around him and past his car as fast as I possibly can. I hear the door slam and the tires squeal, I make some quick turns, go down some one-ways the wrong way, and finally find a space between buildings too narrow for a car to follow. I come out the other side and run my bike into the used sporting goods store. I sat in the corner for a bit while my heart slowed down, and then tried to ride the unicycle they had on display. I learned that ineptitude + adrenaline = ineptitude. Then I spent the rest of the day ready to bolt every time I saw a silver convertible.
Karly Coleman rode up the Coquihalla, she found that drivers got friendlier as the altitude increased…
All the way up, as motorists passed me slogging on and on, they’d honk and wave. At rest stops they’d inquire if I wanted a ride, or if I needed food or water. No wild humans here, just your good ol’ boys and girls, marveling at the crazy s&$@ some people get up to. The Coquihalla Toll Plaza (as the name implies) collects monies from the various vehicles that choose that route. The fees range from $5 for motorcycles to $50 for those vehicles with 5 axles. It appears from their rate list that $10 per axle is the going rate. Curiously, they don’t get many cyclists, so when I arrived exhausted and exhilarated, they lumped me in with the passengers, who don’t pay any money. They are, like me, just along for the ride.