A friend of mine just moved to Seattle (I have no idea what neighborhood/section...), and has been emailing me various observations on the local cycling culture. He'd been living in Nevada, and he does mostly long-distance road cycling and loaded touring, so the whole urban cycling thing is kind of new to him. We'd been having a conversation about the fixie/brakeless/PBR/hipster fad, and this gem was in his latest email:
"When we first moved here, I was kinda fascinated with the whole urban fixie hipster thing (having absolutely nothing resembling it in the Great Basin), but I'm getting more and more annoyed with it, too. We saw a really unfortunate crash the other day, and I'm pretty certain it was because the rider was trying to go down a steep block without brakes. The dude ended up riding into a parked car to stop himself, and then went down headfirst into the street. Unconscious. But the ambulance came right away, which was good to see."
A couple of threads have popped up recently about jagoff motorists and their run-ins with cyclists, but I sometimes like to remind myself that-- statistically-- just as many idiots are running around on bicycles giving responsible cyclists a bad name.