What did you or your kids learn in drivers ed?

[Flybye]

What keeps spinning around in my brain as I get honked at while I am riding my bike is not so much that people are #@$%^& but that they must not know that it is fine for me to be riding where I am -that legally I am doing what I should be doing.

When I first started riding somewhat seriously about two years ago, I felt more comfortable riding on the left side of the road . My reasoning told me that I would rather see a car coming from the front so that I could react and move if need be rather than to be hit from behind. I also rode on the sidewalk whenever I could. It wasn't that I was some kind of dumb @ss either, it is just that I had no idea that as a cyclist I belonged on the road. I learned a lot from other cyclists and have changed my wayward ways.

Now, if I didn't know the rules of the road as a cyclist, I can tell you for sure that I had no idea as a driver that cyclists were to ride on the road - I missed out on some education somewhere.

I really get ticked off when people assume that we should be just be born knowing everything. That's a soap box for another thread entirely, though.

If people are driving by honking at me to get out of the road, they might have missed something somewhere as well. I guess the most logical place that occurs to me is driver's training.

If it is the fault of poor teaching either in the schools driver's training or in a private instruction training, then, as cyclists, THAT is where we need to start focusing our energy. We need to be sending groups to ride in coordination with driver's training instructors so that all the kids who pass the training not only know how to parallel park because they have done it before, but also know how to drive around cyclists because they have done that before too.

I know it isn't a cure all - but it would have been a huge benefit to me both as a cyclist and as a driver.

Whatdya think?