People who like to yell at cyclists

[mimitabby]

Last week my paper (the Seattle Post Intelligencer) ran an article
about biking and then they had an on line forum to discuss it.
Two different posters threatened to door bicyclists, and a third said he likes to stand where bikes go by so he can push them into the street.
they might have been just blowing off steam, but they are THAT nasty and angry and full of road rage.

When i catch up to someone, I try to smile and be polite. (I'm small and not
intimidating, so i'm sure that helps)
but then i tell them (as fast as i can because i'm afraid they'll zoom off)
what they did wrong.

[spokewench]

A couple of years ago, I was out on my commuter bike (mountain bike) on the road. After work, I had gone out Hwy 180 to go climb our local hillclimb - Snowbowl Road. I had a nice ride and was coming back into town. There is one part of this stretch of road that is 50 mile per hour zone and has a left hand curve where the side of the road just disintegrates into nothingness.

Two men, out of towner road bikers, had just passed me coming into town (this is slightly downhill so you can go pretty fast). A white pickup truck that was going WAY TOO FAST went by me and it appeared at the last minute saw the two bikers up ahead of me a little ways. He was going too fast and so his truck was being pulled into the bikes on the left hand curve. All of the sudden he swerves to avoid hitting the two cyclists in front of me - ALL his fault - his speed was too high and he was not paying attention. He just barely missed the two unsuspecting cyclists in front of me.

So, I got the bird's eye view of what happened and thought the guy was a total raging jerk but I still had to go home so I kept riding. There was a dirt pull off on the side of the road right after this incident happened and the guy in the white pickup truck skidded to a stop in the dirt and got out of his car and was running alongside the road beside me screaming at me that I was to tell him who those guys were and he wanted their names so he could go after them. YIKES, he almost killed those two boys in front of me! So here is this kind of fat guy SCREAMING at me and I'm all of 5'4" and 120 pounds , but as I rode by I just told him that he should settle down that he had almost killed two people because he was not paying attention and that even if I knew the boys names, which I did not, I would not tell him!

What a jerk -