From: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Bike Helmets
Keywords: bikes, safety, law
Date: 31 Jul 92 10:14:20 GMT
Reply-To: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Organization: Penicuik People's Revolutionary Sheepdog Liberation Front

And lo, egpv29@castle.ed.ac.uk (JHenderson) spake unto the masses saying:
>
> Blame the bus driver - he shouldn't have been tailgating the cyclist!!

Location: Princes St.
Traffic: Very busy indeed.

Now can you see why he was so close? Besides, he *did* keep a reasonable
distance initially, but when you're trying to do 30mph and there's a
cyclist sitting in front of you going at < 10mph and *deliberately* not
only slowing up you but also the tailback of traffic that's forming behind
you, what would you do?

My complaint with this guy wasn't just the way he did the sudden stop, it
was with the way he went straight through the red light. Now this wasn't a
case of sneaking through slowly at the very corner of the road, he just
rode straight through it. How the hell he could get all offended at the bus
driver for being inconsiderate and then run a red light, I don't know.
Presumably he thought that having a motorist do something nasty allowed him
to break the law in return. Going by that reasoning, the bus driver, having
had to make an emergency stop to avoid the dumb cyclist, could have then
broken another law in exchange by, say, running over the cyclist and
crushing both him and his miserable machine beneath the not inconsiderable
weight of a City Sprinter bus, leaving his bleeding and crushed worthless
carcass messily oozing life, splintered bone shards, pulped brains and
leaking intestinal fluids over Princes St.

I know the driver started it, but the cyclist was also braindead. Sorry,
but I just don't subscribe to this view that just because some motorists
don't give cyclists due consideration, all cyclists are allowed to do
whatever they want. Wasn't it you, Jeremy, that just said something about
many cyclists veering between considering themselves as "road users" and
"augmented pedestrians"?

Of course, the solution to the problem is quite straightforward. Take the
patent alligator/sharpened stake and tripwired-triggered machine-gun trap
that Claudio and I devised to prevent cycling on the paths marked "No
Cycling" at KB and install them along Princes St. I'd also like to put in
some additional shape recognition equipment to cause them to automatically
open fire on cycle couriers, whether they've done anything wrong or not.

OK, on a different note...

While waiting for the bus this morning I was approached by two scruffy
looking youths who were apparently trying to hitch a lift (*). The
conversation went..

SY: Could you spare...
ME: Sorry, I don't have any change [I had a grand total of 1p on me]
SY: We only want 10p.
ME: Sorry, but I don't have any change.
SY: It's only 10p we want.
ME: Look, I just told you I don't have any change!
SY: No change?
ME: NO CHANGE!
SY: We only want 10p.
ME: I DON'T HAVE ANY BLOODY CHANGE!
SY: So how're you going to catch a bus then?
ME: I've got a bloody monthly bus ticket!
SY: Oh. [Wanders off]

Kinda I wish I'd had 10p so I could have given it to him and made him go
away.

(*) Very odd this - there were two of them and they were both attempting to
hitch on different sides of the road. Weren't they particularly fussy about
where they were going or something?

--
		Not Al Crawford - Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk
     "The water shines/A sheepdog skips across the face/A dozen times"
Newsgroups: alt.peeves