man there are some seriously agro drivers today.

i was making a left on a small 2 way street and i was taking the lane in the left side ( allows impatient drivers to make a right turn without waiting for me ) and this hand job of a driver in his huge suburban comes flying around my right ( i was track standing at the stop light for one beat ) and without stopping, the suburban cuts left in front of me breaking the back wheels loose on his truck, and tears off yelling something at me. ( he had to hop the curb on the right of the road to get around me , then cut me off )

i was pretty shocked ( down on se 4th and curuthers in portland near omsi )
had his plate number, called the non emergency number and reported his reckless driving, and i think the dispatcher was laughing at me, wtf.

Youre supposed to say you saw him drinkin beer...so theyll actually do something.

ha
you may have a very valid point my friend

Strange, I usually don't encounter bad drivers like that in the inner part of Portland, it's always when you're out past about 60th or 82nd, or anywhere too far out of the metro area. If this happened somewhere around 5pm, though, that could explain it - the guy was in a hurry to start the weekend after a 9-5 M-F work week, I guess.

yeap

5pm exactly

this is the first time i have had probs in inner se btw, i live there and its great.
maybe they need psychology / anger test for people buying huge vehicles hehe.

[edit] i know this is a long story but it is pretty frickin bizarre and crazy for actually being true.

I live in se (35th and hawthorne) and i rarely see ****ty drivers but downtown (although calm usually) i have had some crazy experiences. I'll relay the most fresh (3 days old) i've had. There is little to no exaggeration, believe me.

It was mid afternoon and my friend mitch and i were heading home from downtown, up 3d ave towards the hawthorne bridge. Actually, we were turning right on 3d. i didn't realize that was the way he was taking so we were separated by this lady in a red sedan. she turned with me but into a closer lane to her right. As we turned she yelled, quite harshly really, "get off the road!!!"

i responded by rapidly pulling up to her drivers side window and matched her speed. She looked quite frightened, maybe she expected i'd actually "get off the road"
She then yelled "get away from me. You ****ing idiot! Get off the road. You're going to get hit!"

this sounds like concern but if you could have heard her raspy trailer trash ***** voice screeching it at me you'd realized she was just a crazy dumb *****.

anyway... i just responded by looking at her as she smashed the gas pedal not realizing she had to come to an immediate stop at a light were i re-joined her. she held her middle finger in my face as i was calmly track standing right next to her. she kept screaming "get off the ****ing road you ****ing ******!!!" and stuff like that. I tried to explain that a. i am a legal vehicle and we are required to share the road together and b. it would be illegal for me to be anywhere else but the road in our case. she didn't give a flying **** and i got fed up. finally, after saying get off the road again, i just looked her in her ****ty, fiery little eyes and said "NO"

for the next 4 or 5 blocks i stayed right next to her window, enduring her blood curdling bullsh-i-t and middle fingers.
each block she became more aggressive and started cutting me off by lane switching . then she'd change lanes away from me and i'd follow just for fun. eventually she tried to sandwich me between a big van and her at a light giving me my final screeching ridicule

not knowing what else to leave for her as a parting statement (as i had to turn to take the bridge)
i just firmly and quite loudly shouted. "shut the **** up you ignorant *****" .

i wish i had had something better to say.

mitch was with me for most of this and we are still bewildered to this day (all be it only 3 days or so past) at this ladies irrational, unprovoked rage.

so i'd say that's agro for ya

Some woman today ran a red light in her Mercedes going about 20mph over the speed limit and almost t-boned me as I was crossing the street. She slammed on her brakes and skidded to a stop in front of me, then yelled at me. I was so shaken up I couldn't even say anything.

I believe you. I had a very similar experience recently. Rather than use my words like a good boy before I left, I punched his van.

someone needs to make a sticker (that is really hard to get off... like a perminant one) and you can slap on there car/windshield that explains to them the rules of the road... and that they cant get off

velolove, that is an incredible story.. I would have called her plate number in to the police though.

Why are you guys calling them 'agro'? Isn't that a type of music? Why not just say 'aggressive'?

dudes, 110% best solution right here. I carry small rocks in my altered cell phone pocket which is now an arsenal of justice for all bike bigots. So when someone feels like driving irratically, cutting me off, yelling **** etc. I snatch up a stone and hit their $hit in hopes they will stop and i will get to talk to them face to face. Now don't get me wrong i know its not good to combat idiocy with more idiocy; however - i got sick of mawfoggers getting to piss me off and always getting away scot free. In VT cops don't do a thing other than mess with minorities so it would be futile to call anyone in hopes they'd 1. actually find the person i was btching about 2. actually DO anything even if they did.

I notice 90% of the time it's women or old people who honk or say ****. the other 10 is college kids (cause this is a college city) and those piss me off even worse cause they're rich and i'm not so I throw rocks as the SUV mommy and daddy bought them. I have yet to break a window but i def nick up a good paintjob on the daily regular hahahaha. as for the gerrys and the womens, they never stop - it's like a shark that gets whacked on the nose; they never have bikers rebuttal their cunntery so when it does happen they're all disoriented and go into a tonic state. it's science.

Until you toss a rock at the wrong car and the guy murders you with his car.

This is the stupidest and dangerous thing i've heard of anyone doing on these forums in a while. Stop riding a bike and giving the rest of us a bad name.

You should compliment your rock-hucking with a scraggly beard, some stinking dirty clothes, a 40oz in a paper bag, missing teeth, and some unintelligible yelling at no one in particular. That way, you won't look out of context.

agreed... I can't stand other cyclists giving motorists yet another reason to try and clip us off the road.

On the other hand, leading an agro driver into a critical mass is justice. That on the other hand is non-violent and teaches the person to share the road.

Exactly. One of the reasons there are agro drivers out there is because some cyclists do **** like throw rocks at their car.

Just laugh this stuff off. If someone is yelling at you for riding your bike, you know you're happier than they are. Blow it off.

for the record i did nothing to escalate the situation, nor do i condone that behavior.

just posting what happened

cheers

i was trying to cross the sidewalk on foot a few weeks ago. A man and a woman in a jaguar are approaching but i was crossing the street, the guy stops his car in my way and says "there are cars trying to pass here" and I said "I have the right of way, I'm trying to cross the street". He realizes that I'm right but his wife sticks her head out the window and starts going off "you do not have the right of way" i responded "yes I do", she responds "no you dont and your stupid"

LOL good response when someone is right, call them stupid.

it made my day.

yeah, while i tagged along side of the crazy b-i-tch lady i couldn't stop thinking about the pure fact that she was quite literally trapped in her car and had no control, especially over me. it made me feel great.

i wouln't ever damage a car for fear of provoking blind road rage and getting killed or perpetuating negativity but quite often when i get cut off or am the victim of a ******y driving move i will tap-slap a car. i feel like in most every case it a. scares the driver that they may have hit me (which they could have easily done) and b. instills a fear of doing so and hopefully more awareness than resentment seeing as even some of the most unnasuming or innocent drivers can pull the stupidist **** some times.

thoughts on the slap?

the slap has saved my life.

i punched a driver's side window as hard as i could once when she almost ran over my foot. lady was in a BMW, yapping on her cell phone in the middle of a busy intersection. i was a pedestrian, not on a bike though.

mine as well.

Haha, that's a funny reaction. I can't imagine having the presence of mind to wind up for a punch, rather than impulsively moving my hand in the car's direction. Slap can be a good thing!

Since we're talking about agro drivers in Portland, you should go back and read ORS 814.430 before you get all righteous on drivers. If you were at her driver's side door, you were on the wrong side of the street and clearly weren't obstructed by any hazards.

Really, stop fueling the fire.

umm... i was in my own lane on the right side next to her left side ( 4 lane street, you might know)

did you think about that?

...and after some of the idiotic stories and things i read and see (especially on this dysfunctional forum), i am not really "fueling the fire", at least not as much as some.

... so please...really.

[edit] and i know what ORS 814.430 says and understand it. i do not feel that i could possibly be at fault for most of the story as i was making my way to the left lane to make an eventual left, respecting traffic direction and speed and remaing on my right side of each lane. Also, is an irrational, irrate, road raged driver forcing me to my left for fear of my life not concidered a "reasonable hazard as decided by the cyclist"?. plus, come the **** on, there are bigger problems to solve.