Originally Posted by M Rose

Background:
I consider myself a newbie in cycling, even though I have been riding between 10 and 30
miles daily for the past year. My wife has only ridden a hand full of times around the block in this amount of time and relies on my knowledge of riding along the streets of our home town.

The Story:
Last night I asked my wife to join me on a ride a crossed town to get a burger and some ice cream at one of our favorite dinners. It’s a relatively short ride and almost a straight line from our house to the dinner taking one of the lesser used streets.
Along the route, the street has Three major intersections. The first one is at our drive way, the second is about half way down and is the busiest of the three, and the last one is at the far end of the street.
Any ways, we are cruising down the street just coming upon the second intersection when a car honks at me. The car passes aggressively staying in our lane and his right hand mirror taps my left shoulder. I was riding just a foot or two to the right of center because of parked cars and my wife staggered ahead of me and riding dangerously close to the parked cars.
I stood up on the pedals and caught up to the car in a matter of feet and was well infront of the car when he reached the stop sign at the intersection where he started yelling obscenities at me. I got all of the normal “Riding the wrong way” (I was riding in the direction of traffic), “Get out of the way of cars” (there was no where to go to get out of his way at that exact second), “ride on the side walk” (illegal to ride on the side walks in our town), and my favorite “ you can’t keep up with traffic”. The last is my favorite because on this street the speed limit is 15 mph, and while he was doing apx 20-25 MPH I passed him before he started slowing down.
When I started explaining the laws of the road to the driver he got even more upset and stepped out of his car threatening to beat my ass. This didn’t work out well for him because a police officer made the corner at the intersection and got involved.
Eye witness accounts put blame on the driver where he got belligerent with the police officer and was issued a number of citations… unfortunately I have to go to court in a few weeks to press charges.