Monday, July 26, 2004

The Friendly Mazda Driver

Many thanks to the man at the wheel of a black Mazda MPV on Fanshawe Park Road this past Sunday morning. If you hadn't swerved over, lowered your window and yelled at me that I should be on the bike path, I would have never known that I was transgressing against your self-directed campaign to rid the road of two-wheeled pests.

A couple of things I'd like to point out:
  1. I evolved my cycling chops on the streets of Montreal. Self-righteous London drivers don't really scare me.
  2. You're wrong: it's my option to use an arterial bike path or the road. Given statistics that show arterial paths have accident rates that are orders of magnitude beyond those for the good old road, I choose the road. Deal with it.
  3. My one run-in with a car also happened while I was legally riding on a bike path, when a moron arguing with his wife blew a stop sign and t-boned me. As idiotic as you looked and sounded from your driver's perch, not even I would wish that on you.
  4. You may be surrounded by a couple of tons of steel and glass, but I'm the one with a photographic memory and a cell phone. I won't soon forget your license plate - ASAR 266 - and if you tick me off again, I'll be certain to thumb 911 before you get to the next red light.
  5. You forgot to use your turn signal when you turned right onto Richmond. I guess you were too busy high-fiving yourself for being so clever before your second cup of coffee.
In future, you would do well to remember that the road supports all kinds of vehicles. Expect to be surprisingly entertained if you ever encounter me and pull a similar stunt again.

4 comments:

Trillian said...

Great post, Carmi. I wish you could publish that in the Free Press.

carmilevy said...

Thanks, T! I reserve the right to turn anything I write - here and elsewhere - into a column. I short-listed this topic for this week's deadline, but ultimately decided on a much nicer, softer idea. It would have been too close, subject-wise, to my cigarette butt rant last time out, so I decided to rest the nastiness for a bit. But soon...

Anonymous said...

Hey that was me that yelled at you... You were in my way... Why not get a car and help our economy by buying fas. Don;t you know that the oil companies ned additional revenues. An Car insurance... if you drove a car you would pay insurance.. and the polution... don;t you know that polution is good for the environment.

You and all you bicycle driving morons are a selfish apes.

Your friend,

Q

carmilevy said...

Um, right. But at least we grammar-check our work before clicking Publish.