Biking Annoyance
I understand (sort of — it’s still frustrating) when motorists think they have the exclusive right to the road (hint: legally, NO) and honk/yell at bicyclists going slower-than-car-speed in front of them. But when a public bus honks at me to get out of the way when I’m riding down Mass Ave, exercising my rights as vehicular traffic — well, I’d have hoped the MBTA would train their drivers more thoroughly in the rules of the road.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:15 pm
you can alwyas call up the transit authority and complain. get the bus number or something. the driver will be disciplined, I’m sure. Steven did this once in Chicago after a bus told him to GET OFF THE ROAD.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 am
I did, in fact, write a nasty letter to the CTA (I wrote down the bus number, route number, and timestamp). They wrote back and said that I was completely in the right and that the employee had been “disciplined”, but that they couldn’t tell me what exactly that meant for reasons of “employee privacy”. So either that means they took me seriously or blew me off, but I can’t find out despite their status as a pseudo-governmental organization. Yay for transparency!
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 am
Furthermore, there is this problem in most cities in the U.S. that the main vehicular arteries aren’t engineered properly for bikes and cars/buses/trucks to coexist. Certainly I can understand the frustration of the bus driver (and bus riders) stuck behind a cyclist — but the problem is not the cyclist. The problem is that there is not a passing lane, or that there is too much vehicular traffic for the bus to effectively pass, or that the lane is not wide enough for the bus and cyclist to share it, or that there is no dedicated bike lane. If you’re feeling like a starry-eyed idealist, you could write your civic leaders and encourage them to solve this problem by making a bike lane where there is now a parking lane or something.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Yeah, I did consider reporting the bus, but I wasn’t 100% sure I’d interpreted the situation correctly.
There is a bike lane… about a block in front of where this happened. So the bus wouldn’t have been stuck for long.