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Re: Driving Pet Peeves
In article <1995Jun21.152317.11548@dg-rtp.dg.com>,
David Pressley <pressley@fireball.rtp.dg.com> wrote:
>In article <3rqq7k$mar@fellis.bisco.kodak.com> bilbo@bisco.kodak.com (Charles Tryon) writes:
>>
>> My biggest peeve is motorist who whine about how much time they lost one
>> time when they got "stuck" behind a couple of cyclists who were riding
>> side by side.
>
>I really despise idiot cyclists who ride side by side. I don't know how
>many times I have been driving 55 mph, go around a curve in the road and
>come upon cyclists blocking the road doing...what...15-20 mph???
Without going into the moral implications of side by side bicycling,
I'd like to point out that if you were surprised by cyclists
"blocking" the road doing 15-20 mph, you were going *way* too fast for
the conditions.
A speed limit of 55 doesn't mean that it's legal or safe to drive 55
everywhere along the road. The basic speed law still applies - this
means that at any point you're supposed to be driving slow enough that
you can safely stop for anything that might appear on the road. If
instead of two bikes moving at 15-20, there had been a car that was
stopped (0 mph) around that bend, then it would have been your
responsibility to be able to safely stop for it. This is with a
closing speed of 55 mph. The closing speed with the bikes would only
have been 35-40 mph, and you should very easily be able to avoid them.
By the way, using the road for its intended purpose, i.e., travelling
on it legally, is not considered "blocking" the road.
--
Siddarth Subramanian
siddarth@cs.utexas.edu
Austin, Texas, USA
References: