Thread: Speed limits?
View Single Post
Old 08-01-07, 08:59 AM
  #24  
WriteABike
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Smithfield, UT
Posts: 112

Bikes: Felt F60, Apollo Concorde, Easy Racers Javelin, Panasonic Tourist, Unknown Steel MTB

Mentioned: 0 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 0 Post(s)
Likes: 0
Liked 0 Times in 0 Posts
Ooh ooh! I've got a good story! A friend and I were riding home from work, going about 21mph, approaching a bend in the road with an advised speed of 20mph. There's a house and trees blocking the view around the bend, so you can't see what's coming, and the road is narrow--barely two full lanes. Right as we get to the curve, a pickup truck pulling a 30 foot (about) trailer loaded with hay pulls into the other lane to pass us, but of course he has to slow down to our speed so he doesn't tip over or overshoot the road. To make the situation really fun, a car comes from the other direction. I thought the guy in the truck was going to run us off the road, but thankfully he didn't. We slowed down, but his trailer was so long he had no chance of getting around us. He made the other car bail off the road into a driveway. I looked over to see how the guy driving the pickup truck was reacting to the situation, fully expecting to get yelled at. He was talking on a cell phone. I wonder what he was saying. "Oh, I'm driving in the wrong lane, and there's a car coming. I'm an idiot." That's what he should have said.

After we got through the bend, he was still right next to us. His load was heavy enough that he still had a hard time getting past us. It was quite possibly the stupidest bit of driving I've ever seen. On the bright side, he didn't pull back over and run us off the road.

It's like he felt compelled to pass the cyclists even if they were going faster than he could through a blind curve on a narrow road with oncoming traffic. Good ol' cell phones. He might as well have been drunk.
WriteABike is offline