I was walking along a narrow two-lane rural road last year when two teenage cyclists on mountain bikes passed me. One was in the roadway, the other riding behind him on the soft shoulder next to the pavement. The one in back yelled to his friend: "You'd better not ride in the road, or you're going to get hit by a car!" His friend responded by steering off the roadway onto the soft shoulder, where he then lost control and ended up falling in the drainage swale.

There were no cars in sight.