mikeybikes

A large stick is laying the bike lane. The stick is approximately two inches in diameter and long enough to cover the entire bike lane if it is perpendicular to the lane lines.

What do you do?

jon c. 

Stop and move it out of lane would be my usual response.

Depends, I guess, on if I'm in a huge hurry and/or if it's a lane totally littered with crap so one stick more or less won't matter.

But generally I try to move such things so the next person doesn't run over it. Or I don't run over it the next day.

megalowmatt

Bunny hop.

seely

Bunny hop if I can't get around it, or if I safely can, ride past it and kick it to the curb with my right foot.

AdamDZ

It might be a snake! It happened to me while trail riding at least two times. So bunny hop!

z90

Yep, you shoulda had a bunny hop option.

cpt. Howdy

Depends on alot of things. Momentum, energy level, what bike I'm on, if I pass it daily...

I'm not above taking a broom to work to clear some broken glass in the road.

mikeybikes

Damn, I knew I missed an option, Bunny Hop.

mikeybikes

Here's what prompted this:

I'm sitting on floor 32 of my building eating my lunch, staring down at the street like I often do. I notice a stick in laying in the bike lane. I was hoping someone would move it, I certainly didn't want to travel down 32 floors and two elevators just to move the stick.

I watched bicyclists, hoping one of them would move the stick. In the forty-five minutes I sat there watching the peons from the view of my tower, 18 rolled over it (perhaps some bunny hoppers?) and 6 moved around it. None moved the stick itself.

I'm now back at my desk on floor 24, and I suspect the stick is still there. If it is when I'm heading home, I'll probably move it.

Stealthammer

I selected "Stop, move the stick out of the bike lane" but the truth is I would probably try to use my back wheel to swat it off the trail as I rode past if it wasn't too heavy looking, and if I missed I would go back and try it again, and if I failed the second time I would move it by hand as a penalty for failure.



This goes back to a "game" we use to play with a beer can when we were bored and out on a college run. We would setup a beer can and ride straight at it, then lift the back wheel up slightly and swat the can as we passed it. The one who moved the can the farthest won. I still do the same thing with crap I see on the road just to keep my skills sharp.....

Another one was to ride just to the side of the can and do a quick stoppie, lifting the rear wheel up above the can, and shift the rear wheel over while it is in the air so that it came down directly on top of the can and crushed it. Or, if the can is on it's side, we would roll up to it and pickup the front wheel and drop it on top of the can's side so that the can "grabbed" the tire as the side got crushed, then as the tire continued forward we would reach down in front of the downtube and grab the dented can before it hit the back of the fork. If you got good enough at that we would do the same thing with the back wheel and grab the dented can before it hit the seat stays.

Ok, don't bother telling me that we must have been pretty bored to spend time doing this, because once we got that down we would do the same thing with the can sitting on top of a concrete parking bumper, and then on top of a picnic bench. We even did the same thing on the top of a 3' block foot wall on our 20" bikes.....

Ok, maybe we were a bit bored....

toobspunk

Move the stick, anything else would make you a dick.

10 Wheels

Hide in the bushes and take the crash photos.

Pedaleur

Tell it to get a room?

AdamDZ

Or... If you waited long enough the stick would have eventually deteriorated into dust. Problem solved!

billyymc

Re-route the bike lane.

weshigh

push it out of the bike lane into the all travel lane.

rumrunn6

the "right" thing to do is stop move the stick and then continue

mikeybikes

That typo is too good to fix.

genec

Heck I'm the kinda guy that trims trees that are in the way... I sure would move a stick.

ItsJustMe

Heck, I generally will stop and pull entire trees out of the road even if I can ride around them. The first few miles of my route are on a gravel road through the woods. Sometimes there's a tree that I can't budge, in which case I just carry my bike over it and keep going.

I'll also stop and pull road hazards out of the traffic lane if it's safe (screws, nails, etc).

kjmillig

Call city road maintenance so they can come out tomorrow (or next week), park and set up a big caution sign and cones blocking the bike lane and 1/2 of the car lane for a full block, have 3 guys take 20 minutes to put on their orange vests and hard hats, get brooms and shovels out of the truck, stroll over to the stick, spend 10 minutes assessing the situation (BS-ing), one of them go find gloves in the truck, finally pick up the stick and throw it in the back of the truck, load up shovels and brooms, take off hard hats, gloves, and vests, get a drink of water, retreive cones and caution sign, depart, file reprt for 3 hours of work to remove road debris.

curbtender

I slow down and give them a kick. It's really not a big hazard unless it's on a downhill.

unterhausen

I got big tires on my commuter so I could run over things like that. Sometimes I ride out of my way so I can ride over sticks. I'm sure if I ever saw a stick that was big enough to be a problem, I would stop and move it, but there are so many sticks in the road around here that you would never get anywhere if you moved all of them. I generally avoid roads with bike lanes, none of them around here are particularly compelling

fixed the poll, now some people have to pretend they would bunny-hop the stick

antonyfhilliard

E) Drag your foot and kick the stick towards the gutter as you pass it.

mulveyr 

I ride 650bX38's. I wouldn't even notice it when I glided over it. ;-)