Crashed into arm gate?
 

Well, today I crashed into an arm gate on my campus and was quite embaressed! Thankfully i was wearing glasses and no serious damage.

Has anyone had this happen to them?

How did the glasses help?

Are you talking about a parking area gate, one with a steel pipe at the end.

Sometime ago, I posted a story of a teacher that cycled into the pipe and died.
(search function not working right now to find the thread link)

It helped from further injury. Maybe my eye could've been damaged or something.

I heard of that story but I'm lucky it wasn't a steel pipe one. For some reason the entrance gate was down. I was listening to music and zoned out and didn't see the gate lol.

So the gate was at eye level? I guess what I am asking is did your body hit the gate or did your bike?

After I had just started mountain biking with a few friends back in 2006, I had decided to go myself and do the same trail at Ringwood State Park in NJ that we had done the week before as a group. Part of the route involves taking the pavement from one parking area on the south side of the park down a hill past the park entrances to the lake on the north side of the park. We had bombed the hill at a pretty quick pace the previous week and it was exhilarating. I figured that I would replicate that same pace on my solo ride.

I'm zooming down the hill and approaching the entrance gate on the road to the lake and there is a pickup truck parked right in the middle of the lane and two people outside of it talking to each other. Still at high speed, I swing around the truck and people to see the wooden gate closed. The gate is supposed to be opened at 8:00am and here it was about 8:20. Since the truck was in front of the gate I could not see that it was still closed and did not have enough time to stop. The ancient cantilever brakes I had barely slowed me down and I hit it nearly at full speed. The head tube of my Cannondale M700 took the brunt of the impact with the 1"x6" sandwiched construction gate arm breaking in half and I flew over the handle bars for about 30 feet then rolled for another 10 feet, knocking the wind out of me and giving myself one hell of a road rash on my hip in the process.

The couple from the pickup who had been waiting for the park rangers to open the gate came over to help me and called the ambulance. After the EMTs checked me out and bandaged me up 45 minutes later I walked the bike back to the car and drove home in what I can only describe as painful humiliation. The head tube survived but got pretty scratched up at the impact point.

I ride with a guy who can side saddle and ride under gates like that at speed. He is shorter and has a small frame bike. I tried to do it for fun at ~1mph and could not clear it without bumping my helmet and shoulder.

I can trigger the gates to exit a parking lot by riding my bike over the loop. It always amazes pedestrians who see a bike triggering the gate to move up.

i saw a driver deliberately bust through one to avoid paying the $1 parking fee.
another stopped short of going all the way through (same gate, different date)
after paying and the arm whacked the hood three times before the driver could
escape. dented it pretty good (or bad). driver freaked out.

A couple of years ago, I rode into a steel cable that was across a parking lot entrance. I had ridden into the same entrance before and it never was cabled. There was a reflector on the cable, but it was in the middle, and I turned right into the parking lot, so the reflector was ten feet off to one side, not in front of me. Gray cable, gray parking lot. All I knew was suddenly I was laying on the ground on the other side of the cable with one foot still clipped in. No broken bones or anything, broke a fender on the bike, generally banged me and bike up. I was wondering if that had ever happened before, and when I started googling it, I found the account of a lady riding a 4-wheeler or snowmobile (I forget which) who was killed that way.

Last year I clipped a garbage can that was into the road about a foot. It was on a long straightaway that I ride almost daily so I wasn't paying a lot of attention far up the road. Had my head down,doing what passes for a strong effort from me, and hit the handle/hinge of this big plastic trashcan. It must have been pretty full as it only made about a quarter turn but it left a nasty bruise on my upper right arm.