Bruner Blog

I owe a word of thanks to some driver out there in Harlem for not opening his door in my face as I bicycled past him an hour ago.

I’ll make a not-very-proud admission here: I’m the kind of NYC bicyclists I suppose pedestrians and drivers sometimes shake their fists at, or at least their heads. Outwardly, it might appear I’m a bit reckless. Three years of Manhattan biking and no accidents, so I just trust my instinct and go with it. Truth is, I feel much safer biking here than I did in San Francisco, where the cars get going much faster, constantly run red lights and generally don’t share the same unspoken code with the pedestrians and bicyclists as in NY, where everybody agrees to get out of each other’s way just in time, and nobody will get hurt. By comparison, South of Market on a bicycle will truly put the fear of God in you every day.

Here it’s really easier to predict what everyone else is going to do, and they just expect the same of you. That’s why I don’t feel like such a jerk biking the way I do — I’m really about average as recklessness goes. But that’s what the drivers and pedestrians all expect from bicyclists, that’s our role in the traffic flow. Everyone knows we’re going to run the light if it just changed, so they simply wait for us to do it. If we stopped and let the cars that had the light go, they’d be completely confused, expecting we were going to dart in front of them just as they started to move. It’s really easier for everyone’s sake if we just never slow down.

Except, as I say, once in a while I push it perhaps a bit too far, jumping up on the sidewalk to avoid a delivery truck and threading thru pedestrians on their own turf. It’s fine if they don’t see me coming and I’m gone in a blur and thru another red light and back into traffic before they know the difference, but once in a while they’ll turn and see you coming and drop their groceries or suddenly cling to their baby stroller or something. (Oh, and needless to say, I’m normally wearing headphones, too; listening exclusively to NPR, as if that made it any better.)

So I’m publicly admitting to being a cad on wheels here in hopes that coming clean somehow evens out my karma, as I just got a big favor handed to me about an hour ago. Normally, covering my own ass is my first priority, but even at that, I’m mostly just enjoying the ride. So I was zooming down 125th Street on my way back from the post office, hugging the parked cars on the right closer than I normally do because traffic is tight and narrow on that street. Suddenly, some guy in a van inches in front of me started to open his door. I was just tune out enough that I didn’t notice it immediately and would certainly have had my first taste of glass and steel in that all-too-common bike accident scenario. But the guy apparently looked in his rearview mirror just in time and checked himself, sparing me dentures and plastic surgery. We made fleeting eye contact, and I think he was as alarmed as me, just better reflexes.

I turned over my shoulder and gave him a hasty thumbs up, but I’m afraid he might have thought I was flipping him off instead of thanking him. So, in the highly unlikely event that he’s a Bruner Blog reader, thanks!

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 16th, 2002 at 1:38 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.