Articles by Robert Drinkwater

Riding in the rain builds character, I always say. Still, my “character” is wearing just a little thin from all the downpours we’ve been getting lately. So here’s some advice on ways you can stay safe and dry while rolling to your destination.

Clothing:
There are two universal laws of physics when it comes to rainwear. The first is that if too few of us are carrying rain jackets or pants, the cycling gods become angry and make it rain. The second is that as soon as you fish your jacket and rain pants out of your panniers and put them on, the rain will stop.
Waterproof, breathable fabrics like Gore-Tex will keep all but the most torrential rainstorms from soaking you. The “breathable” claim is accurate only up to a point — if you’re pedaling hard and tend to perspire a lot, you may still get a buildup of sweat. It’s still better than the cheaper alternative, which is rubberized nylon. That stuff keeps the rain out, but moisture builds up quickly underneath.
Also, full-length fenders on both the front and the back are the best way to protect your feet from the spray generated by your tires. They also prevent dirty road water from coating your bike (and you).

Cargo:
Plastic bags from the supermarket are bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Except they’re really good for keeping things in your panniers or backpack dry. Keep a few handy in your pack, If it’s raining, insert your stuff into the bags, and tie shut. Reuse often.

Safety:
Fortunately, most rainwear is bright yellow, red or orange. This makes it easier for cars to see you, and helps rescuers spot you if a flash flood washes you away.
Watch out for puddles — potholes are known to hide in them. Remember, too, that you should be careful if you’re using a hood to keep your head dry because your range of vision will be reduced. Turning on your flashing lights also helps cars see you.

Your Bike:
Braking in the rain may be more difficult, particularly if you have steel wheels. (Steel has a shiny, reflective appearance compared with alloy, which has a buffed look.) A brake tune-up may be needed to make sure you have enough stopping power.
Water also washes the lube off your chain. The solution: lube regularly.

Lightning:
Will your rubber bicycle tires protect you from a lightning strike? According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States, they do not! FEMA says that car tires don’t provide any protection either, but that the metal body of a hardtop car provides more protection that if lightning struck your body.
FEMA says that you should avoid objects like bicycles, golf clubs, and lawn mowers during thunderstorms. Taking shelter under telephone booths and large trees is also bad.
What FEMA doesn’t say is that riding a bike during a thunderstorm can be very exciting! But now that you know the dangers, you can make up your own mind.

“Lightning’s unpredictability increases the risk to individuals and property.” — FEMA

Finalists will be selected and the winner will be chosen at the Bike-In Movie picnic this Saturday evening. You can still get a last-minute entry in by e-mailing drinkwaterrobert@hotmail.com.

And now, for fun, here is my own badass story..
I was at a stop sign waiting for the traffic to clear in front of me, when a woman in a car behind me honked the horn and screamed out her window that she had the right to pass me and be first at the intersection. She swore like a sailor, her face was contorted and red, and she appeared on the verge of having a stroke. I had Gatorade in my water bottle — undiluted — and squirted it onto her windshield. She made the mistake of turning on her wipers, which turned the sugary drink into a sticky sheen on the glass. I heard the car’s washer-fluid pump buzzing, but the nasty hag appeared to have forgotten to fill the tank. I pedalled off, while she was stuck at the stop sign with an opaque windshield.

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.

Here are some very good entries in the Bike Month Badass Contest. You can enter, too, by e-mailing drinkwaterrobert@hotmail.com with your own bike vs. car encounters. Three finalists will be selected, and the winner will be chosen by audience response at the Ride-in-Movie, 12130 River Road, on June 21. You can enter right up until then. Power to the pedal people!

A very badass entry from Michael Halliwell:
I was riding westbound along Whyte Avenue last summer when a little sport truck passes me at about 108 St.  Out of the passenger window an empty Red Bull can gets chucked at me as this little truck goes by.  Well, they sort of forgot that red lights happen on Whyte Ave, so I caught up to them at the corner of Whyte and 109th. I wasn’t vulgar, didn’t loose my cool… in fact I didn’t say a word. I just pulled up alongside the truck, leaned over towards the open passenger window, tilted my head down to get a better view and stared right in at both the passenger and driver.  Neither would make eye contact with me….kinda the whistling-and-looking-everywhere-but-at-me thing. I guess this is when I should include the fact I’m 6 feet, 235lb and look a lot like a cop

Not every driver is bad, according to Marcel J. Huculak:
I didn’t end up throwing anything at a driver or even say anything, but it was the funniest thing that has happened to me on my bike. I was leaving a friend’s house in St. Albert on a late Sunday morning. I had to turn left from Hebert Road to St. Albert Road – the intersection of two very busy arterials. After executing a fine CANBIKE left turn and lane change to the right lane on St. Albert Road, a mini-van which had also turned left behind me pulled up in the lane beside me. The passenger had rolled down the window and shouted to me “Excuse me!” I turned my head toward the passenger and was expecting the usual diatribe from him, like, “get off the road loser,” or, “get a car.” Instead, he surprised me by saying with a smile on his face, “My wife thinks you have sexy legs!” I don’t know if the man was teasing his wife, but I made the rest of the trip back to Edmonton with a huge smile on my face.

Molly Turnbull writes about her “shameful” badass behavior:
I happily glide along the contriflow lane running along the promenade between 121 st and 116 St. overlooking the golf course. Even though drivers drive dangerously close to the line, even though there’s sand in the lane for 3/4 of the summer, even though there’s a construction or city maintenance truck parked in it half the time — despite all that — I love to drive against traffic. It appeals to my desire to fight back, to freak ‘em out, to rage against the machine.
Sometimes, though, those drivers get just a little too close to my lane. Sometimes they’re not paying attention and I worry that I won’t be able to jump the curb while riding parallel to it. Once I was riding there with my kids in the trailer. An approaching car’s wheel was riding the line and I was staring it down. It inched into the lane and was coming closer, faster. Fear welled up in me as I rang my bell and shouted. I thought of how I could jump to the curb, but my kids would be smashed.
At the last minute, the driver skidded to a stop, window open, inches from me. I looked down and screamed “What the @#$ do you think you’re doing? Get off the @#$% public road if you can’t pay attention. You almost creamed me and my $%^&ing kids with your @#$% car.”
After the rage had subsided, and I rode away shaking, guilt began to creep it’s evil way into my heart. I had just chewed out the cutest looking, apple-faced, blue haired grandma I’d ever seen.

This badass figures it’s best if we don’t print his name:
I once caught a lit cigarette thrown out of a window, and promptly returned-to-sender’s lap. Anti-car, anti-litter, and anti-smoking vengeance coupled with couldn’t-do-it-again reflexes made for ultimate satisfaction. I felt like an eco-ninja.

Keith’s entry is “Monkey Warfare” league badass:
I am probably lucky I haven’t been arrested. Last fall I was making a left turn onto Argyle Road from 99 Street and was waiting in the turning lane for the light to turn green. It was a quiet Saturday morning. Some guy in a Suburban Assault vehicle pulls alongside and starts moving into the turning lane and was basically trying to push me off the lane into the median. Thinking that he may have been asleep, I punched the side of his truck.  He then rolls down the window and tells me to get my f%&*ing bike of the fucking road.
I got off my bike and set it to the median and must say that if there is a good life rule, you don’t want to make me get off my bike. I should also say this incident was preceded by several close calls where I came pretty close to becoming roadkill. Each one involved Suburban Assault vehicles that were being driven recklessly.
So after dismounting and setting my bike to the side, I proceeded to kick the crap out of this guy’s $50-60k SUV and devaluing it in the process, and all the while was inviting him to call the cops or get out of his cage. He rolled up his window and drove off before the light turned green.