Revolutionary Error

So this guy almost hit me yesterday.

I considered reporting him to the police, but I’m not sure it’d be worth my time or theirs. I was going east through this intersection in the rightmost lane and somewhere between the corner and that Dunkin Donuts, this car passed me and cut me off with somewhere between 1 and 2 feet between his bumper and my front tire. According to this law, that was a Class A misdemeanor and sure scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t tell if he started passing me in the intersection or not.

The thing is that the driver had plenty of time and space to drive ahead of me and merge right without cutting me off. Or he could have, you know, gotten behind me. He had to stop at a red light anyway.

Is it just because I’m cycling more and used to the sparsely-populated Champaign Summer or are the roads more of a clusterfuck than usual this Fall? Almost every day I see cyclists riding the wrong way on roads, on the wrong side of the street, and always, always on the sidewalks. Of course very few of them wear helmets. Pedestrians wander into roads and bike paths without looking where they’re going or refuse to get out of the way of vehicles that have the right of way. Drivers have no clue how to deal with cyclists who are riding safely and legally. Sometimes they purposely crowd them or shout at them to get off the road. Drivers get dangerously close to me when I’m on my bike almost every day. Everything is a mess.

And people are getting hurt because of it.

I think it would be in the interest of the city and the university to do more to educate people about road safety. Maybe it should be a required part of Freshman orientation or something. It feels pretty dangerous out there.