It's cold and crisp out there this week and the wind chill is intense: today when I went to work the wind chill was at -25C. It had warmed up to like -15C by the time I headed home, and I'd gotten out of the office before sunset so it was a very pretty evening when I got on the bike. And I was feeling pretty good about being outside in the clean cold for my ride home. Blowing some stink off.
Too bad about the drivers.
Within the first ten or fifteen minutes I'd had four bad interactions with careless or inattentive drivers: people passing too close rather than waiting till it was clear, people turning through my path as though they hadn't seen me or didn't care how close they got. And then I got this, and it's been a few hours by this point but I'm still pretty rattled.
It feels like I saw the car a lot earlier than it appears on the video, which is proably true: I pulled up to the intersection, planning to turn left. I think the car had a turning signal on, so I was watching it. And then I realized he was cutting the corner. A lot. A whole lot. Way too much. He was heading straight for where I was standing.
I yelled "Jesus!" and then yanked the bike out of the way to one side as the car breezed right past me. "Holy shit!!" I was yelling at them. The driver - a man who was probably in his 70s - wasn't looking at me even as he passed within a foot or two of me, and I'm fairly sure he still hadn't actually seen me, standing right there, with a headlight and a bike and a purple jacket. There were three people in the car: as they passed an older woman in the back seat stared out at me in shock.
My rear camera's not recording, so I don't have any video of the car slowing up after it passed me and then stopping in the middle of the street. I imagine the passengers in the car had alerted the driver to the fact he had just nearly hit someone. Or he'd replayed the whole thing in his head and realized there had been someone standing there.
I'm not going to assume that age had something to do with it, though it might have: he did look to be an old man. But inattention did. Force of habit did. The fact that people turn their brains off and fall into habit and subconscious processing did. And the fact that for whatever reason, people on bikes don't have the salience that people in cars do. Guaranteed he wouldn't have cut that corner that hard if I'd been in a car. And I am pretty convinced that he just. . . . didn't see me.
And this is why I act at all times as though the people in cars are oblivious to me. When they get mad at me for being alarmed because they're rolling through a left turn at me, and yell "what's your problem you dumb bitch? I saw you!" they don't understand that I have to assume they didn't. I have to assume they looked at the road ahead of them, their eyes saw a person on a bike, and their brains just said, ". . . . nah."
