Twitterpated motorists

A reader asked if a certain Twitter post referred to me the other day. The person who made the tweet (as I think such things are called) encountered me as I rode to Whole Foods near Mall (Maul) St. Matthews, along Shelbyville Road. As I was getting ready to turn left, I was--wait for it!!--in the left lane.

Before I type any more, I want to put this out: There is no reason to find that tweet and give the person a hard time. The tweet-poster and I have had private exchanges, and I have received and accepted what seems to be an apology. My primary goal in that exchange is that we both gain better understanding of how traffic works and should work, and I'm quite capable of stating my own case in that discussion (citing references as I see fit, of course).

In essence, the driver in question was also in the left lane, and felt it necessary to slow sharply and wait for a hole in traffic in the next lane to avoid hitting me from behind. I remember seeing a few cars lined up at the light where I joined Shelbyville Road (incidentally, the same stretch covered in one of my test videos from a few weeks back and shown on this blog). I remember getting under the Watterson overpasses before any cars that had not been in the queue with me coming out of New LaGrange Road became an issue (or I for them). I haven't paced it, but it's at least a tenth of a mile (520.8 feet, or 176 yards, or...) from the light to that overpass, and I was essentially the only thing moving on that piece of road for several seconds.

Again, I don't feel a need to hammer on this particular driver. I admit that when I first read the tweet in question, I let my dander rise a bit. Well over 99% of the motorists I encounter figure it out well enough, even if less than two thirds of them change lanes two hundred yards or more before overtaking me on multi-lane roads. When I was riding to Crestwood all the time, I would encounter thousands of motorists a week. To have one per week act an ass would come out to far less than a tenth of a percent of that group of motorists, even though one jerk a week seemed like a really high jerk quotient.

However, I think it points to a couple of things that many of us take for granted. Many drivers fail to recognize that streets like Shelbyville Road are NOT limited-access throughways, and as such have "interrupted flow." It is perfectly reasonable--indeed, self-preservation requires--that we expect traffic in front of us to perhaps be going slower than we would otherwise go, and sometimes MUCH slower.

This is one of the lessons I've learned from being a transportation cyclist that has made me a much better driver. It is such lessons that have led me to posit that part of maintaining a driver's license should include some number of documented bicycle miles per year as "continuing education" for drivers. I recognize that implementation and monitoring would seem cost-prohibitive and politically all but impossible, but I firmly believe that having folks ride more (with reasonable exceptions for those with physical impairments) would help folks recognize their limitations as drivers of cars.

I happen to hold as an adjunct to this that people should spend time in a simulator so that they could understand truck drivers' challenges, but that's another rant.