Did your mom forget to bring Oreos down to the basement calwatch? Did this upset your routine and drive you to go online and fact check someone?

James didn’t use expletives, slurs or other hate speech, so his comment will stay. I think it’s a mean, dumb response – and I am grateful for calwatch’s always-helpful input.

“Dooring,” my ass! When pedestrians are exiting a car, they get “biked”!

Sorry (or not-so-sorry), Corvus, I created the term “biked” entirely on my own. I think it has potential as a meme! :-)

The term is self-explanatory: as it illustrates, bikes don’t belong around pedestrians, and they don’t belong among cars. Swat the gnats!

Thank you for pointing out that I’m literate — and, btw, a (now retired) professional typographer.

As for trolling…. Cut the personal invective (e.g., “small-brained”). Civil discussion starts there.

I haven’t attacked you (or anyone here) personally — only their equipment. On this site, I’ve seen cars (and for that matter, motorists) called far uglier names than “gnats.”

I’m stuck on an irrelevant point: I can’t get over how much this guy looks like Fred Armison–as if somehow this picture is supposed be funny/absurd like his character in Portlandia, being all shouty about his right of way on a bike. It’s not.

From a health policy standpoint, we need to get lower educated and lower income people into the health system before they become sick and cost everyone else more. Since parents are likely already enrolled in health care due to having their kids immunized for school and post-natal care, the goal is to then get those in low income jobs with insurance so that maybe they can get a physical exam and have chronic conditions diagnosed for their sake before it becomes critical.

Women without children would likely have been involved in the healthcare system for their reproductive health, even if it’s just birth control pills at Planned Parenthood where they would get a referral to low cost health insurance. And you need ads in English too, although I’m not sure a middle aged white man in Lycra works, but what else would get men who feel invincible to get health coverage?

Wrong, Corvus!

“Italics are used for large works, names of vehicles, and movie and television show titles. Quotation marks are reserved for sections of works, like the titles of chapters, magazine articles, poems, and short stories.” – grammar.yourdictionary.com (or any style manual for typographers and editors).

Try googling “Italics vs quotation marks.” You might learn something, even if you and your brain are most at home in the gnat lane!

I’m not talking about “throwing” a door open (what loaded language!). Looking first is mere common sense!

I’m talking about getting “biked” after a door’s already (partly or fully) open, especially when stepping out of a car, by a bike that seems to come out of nowhere in the intervening few seconds (i.e., from behind an obstruction, moving fast relative to the car-exiter’s standstill). This sort of thing happens all the time!

(To some extent, this problem also applies when a driver is starting out as a light turns green, or is making a right turn.)

Cyclists seem to feel entitled to all this, as part of their “right of way”; the real problem is a combination of lack of timely visibility and an inability to maneuver or stop relative to a stationary or slow-moving object or person — hence, my analogy to hitting a blind person’s cane. The fact that the object may be a car door (or an exiting motorist) is a decoy issue! It’s not really about cars, even if the self-righteous bike lobby has (one hopes, only temporarily) gotten its way with the law.

Despite the currently-prevailing orthodoxy, I believe bikes (given these shortcomings) don’t belong on busy city streets. They should use quiet side streets wide enough to accommodate them — for their own sake, as well as pedestrians and people who drive cars. Meanwhile, swat the gnats!

By the way, lest I seem like a “troll”: I stumbled onto this site quite accidentally, and was outraged by what I saw. I have many interests (some involving subjects far more controversial than those discussed here); though I obviously have strong feelings on this subject, it’s not an obsession of mine.

I keep my posts private because i don’t care to be hounded in my online travels by ideologues, trolls, or thought police of any kind.

If you’re moving so slowly, why can’t you stop in advance? You’re assuming the door is always being “thrown” open at precisely the instant that the bike is passing — not likely. More likely, the bike’s coming out of a blind spot, too fast to be seen and too fast to stop, after the exiting pedestrian has already looked. The more slowly the door opens (or the more slowly the person moves), the more likely this is to happen.

More likely still, by taking the right-of-way for granted, the cyclist simply isn’t watching. At best, the pedestrian is buzzed from inches away.

You’re merely ASSUMING the person stepping out of the car didn’t look — or that they’re lying if they claim they did. Have you ever stopped to ask (let alone apologize)? If you narrowly miss hitting them, by the time they’ve been buzzed and rattled, you’re long gone. Bet that’s true for plenty of the pedestrians you dodge, too!

It’s happened to me, many times. The worst is when the cyclist’s given me the finger. This has even been witnessed by passengers, though I’m not prepared to issue them a subpoena. (I’ve seen it happen to other drivers when I’ve been a passenger, and it’s also happened to me [minus the door] as a pedestrian.)

I didn’t start out detesting cyclists. I’m 67 now, and I used to ride a bike myself, when I was in my 20s — but I learned early on that a bike isn’t an appropriate way to get around on busy city streets.

This isn’t a matter of feeling I’m an “entitled motorist.” I have no such problems with pedestrians (though, as a pedestrian [as I’ve described], I’ve had problems with bikes).