Page Street has become the bane of my existence where bicyclists behaving badly are concerned. Driving home one recent afternoon, I stopped at a four-way sign, looked all directions, and proceeded into the intersection. Out of nowhere, a bicyclist flew through the stop sign to my left, riding right in front of me, forcing me to slam on the brakes. I came inches from hitting him, but he didn’t notice. As he pedaled along the right side of the street, I pulled up next to his rickety bike, rolled down my window, and said, “You have to stop at stop signs just like cars do.” The scrawny, pale, twenty-something with thinning curly dark hair – wearing only Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt and, of course, no helmet – flipped me off and shouted a string of expletives. I felt my Sicilian blood boiling as I kept pace with him. “Why is it you think you’re exempt from the law?” Suddenly and without warning, like the snake that he was, Curly whipped his head around and spit at me from the passenger side. I was in the process of rolling up the window, so his wad of spit didn’t hit me. Instead, it bubbled slowly down the window of my just-washed car.
I kept pace with Curly, rolling the window down part way again. “What you just did qualifies as battery in the state of California,” I yelled, “and you should be arrested for road rage.” Curly laughed and flipped me off with both hands as he steered the bike with his knees. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked smugly. Curly sped up and so did I, pulling in front of his bike, and trapping him between my SUV and the car parked next to him. As he came to a screeching halt, I rolled the window down a couple of inches. What color he had in his pale face drained and suddenly the smug smile was gone. “Are you crazy?” he asked, his voice shaking. Any ability I had to be rational went out my spit-covered window. “If I was crazy I would crush you like a bug right now,” I screamed. “Fortunately for you, I’m not crazy – but the next person you spit at might be and they could run you over or pull out a gun and shoot you.” Suddenly Curly was mute. Having made my point, and thinking maybe Curly learned his lesson, I rolled up the window and continued on my way home.
But Curly hadn’t learned a thing. He pulled along my driver’s side and spit all over that window, then he spinelessly pedaled to the opposite side of the street and rode, illegally, against traffic. We hit the stoplight at the corner of Page and Divisadero at the same time, and, with hoards of people present, Curly got his voice back. “Get out of your [expletive] car and come here and say that, you stupid BMW [expletive]!” he screamed. I shook my head. “You’re pathetic,” I said without rolling down the window this time. “Now you want to fight a woman? Wow, you’re classy.”
Curly continued to hurl profanities and insults, too vulgar to print in this newspaper, until the light turned green. I assume he didn’t want to end up on another deserted stretch of road with me, so he turned left on Divisadero and disappeared.
As I hosed Curly’s disgusting spit wads off my windows, I realized he was right about one thing: there was nothing I could do about it. Had he been in a car, I could have gotten his license plate number, but on a bicycle, he was as anonymous as he was arrogant. Same thing if he runs a red light in front of a red light camera. Same thing if he hits a pedestrian and isn’t stupid enough to talk about it on YouTube. More than ever, I believe it’s time to hold bicyclists accountable for their actions, and that means license numbers that are visible to cops, victims and witnesses – just like on the cars and motorcycles they share the streets with. Police also need to write more tickets. It’s a win-win: hold bicyclists accountable and bring much-needed money to the city. Put some of the money toward bike lanes, bike traffic signals, and bike education.
Unfortunately, well-behaved bicyclists will also have to pay the price, but that’s no different than me paying the price for motorists behaving badly despite not having a violation of any kind all the years I’ve been driving. I know the Bicycle Coalition has a powerful political voice in this town, but we need to stop kowtowing to them and put the brakes on law-breaking bicyclists.
[box class=”aside”]Email: susan@marinatimes.com[/box]
Answering his “battery” of spittle with vehicular assault is unjustifiable.
Based on your description of “pulling in front of his bike, and trapping him [with] my SUV,” it wasn’t just the cyclist behaving badly.
Your description of the event also underlines why infractions committed while riding a bike shouldn’t be treated the same as infractions committed while driving a car. When I interact dangerously with automobiles while I’m cycling, my fellow drivers end up, at worst, with damage to their car. When an automobile driver interacts dangerously with me while I’m cycling, I could end up dead.
Deputy Dyer Reynolds of the Guardian Angels.
The penalty for running a stop sign is ~400
The penalty for assault is you go to the pokey. You intentionally pinned this guy in, which is not vehicular assault, it’s regular assault. Be thankful you didn’t cause him to crash.
We pay taxes and hire police for a reason – because vigilantism isn’t a good alternative. Let the police do their job. If you don’t think their doing their job well, send a nice note to Chief of Police Greg Suhr instead of trying to take the law into your own hands.
Let me get this story straight.
1. Cyclist makes a mistake, runs a stop sign.
2. Susan decides this was one mistake that shouldn’t ever happen again from this cyclist, decides to follow the cyclist in the deadly hunk of metal she driving.
3. Susan then initiates further discourse, and is discouraged by the lack of respect of the cyclist, who doesn’t like being threatened by a hunk of metal with a raging human piloting it.
4. Susan then decides to nearly cause an accident that would not at all injure herself, but would likely kill the cyclist.
So the way I see it, boiled down, is cyclist made a mistake, Susan was so mad they wanted to end the cyclists life, and therefore their ability to make another mistake.
Susan, pretty close? I am surprised you wrote this article, because assault with a deadly weapon is serious.
Wait, who had road rage now?
Even if he did run a stop sign and even tho he did do a rude thing and spit on your precious car what you did is COMPLETELY INSANE. Talk about road rage! A little spit is nothing compared to chasing down, pinning and threatening to kill a person with your 3 ton vehicle. You should be ashamed for yourself for doing this in the first place then having the audacity to brag about it online. You are the kind of person that gives all good responsible motorists a bad name. What a good motorist (and person) would’ve done is brush off the incident instead of chasing them down and escalating the situation.
Guess you’re not so different from the people you’re criticizing tho (irresponsible, reckless and smug). The only difference is you’re much more likely to kill someone with your actions. If I had seen this interaction I would’ve taken down your license plate number and called the cops on you.
I think that Susan’s actions are justified. She makes an excellent point about licensing bicycles and requiring that a visible id is always present while commuting. Bicyclists are becoming increasingly self righteous and their law-disregarding attitude is the true danger here.
Everyone on these comment boards should be ashamed. Susan had a horrible experience with a terrible bicyclist and she wrote about it. Get over it bike fan’s, your just one SUV tire away from death and it’s possible that the car that hits you will drive off and you’ll never know why you woke up in the hospital.
Act like your a guest on the road, not the owner. The road was built for cars, you have the privilege of sharing OUR space, not the other way around.
“Act like your a guest on the road, not the owner. The road was built for cars, you have the privilege of sharing OUR space, not the other way around.”
And there lies the crux of the matter. Cars don’t own the road any more than bicycles do….both share the road. It is not YOUR space. BTW, those roads were built for horses and bicycles before the car was invented.
If anyone is a guest on the road, it’s cars:
http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/
How quickly we forget history.
Regardless, the lethal nature of cars should positively guarantee that they be the ones acting like guests rather than the bulls in the china shop. Susan pulled a might-is-right card on the cyclist and in this article that has absolutely no place in civilized society.
Derek is right. Bicycling infractions lead to skinned knees and possibly some dents to your stupid BMW. Vehicular infractions, especially those where bicyclists are involved, can end in death. You probably should have just gone on with your day, Susan, in spite of what your Sicilian blood wants you to do. Remember…you’re the one driving the deadly weapon, not the cyclist.
Well. Sounds like the guy on the bike was a duche for sure. And people on bikes should follow the laws of the road – mostly for their own safety, and that of pedestrians. But, what with climate change, oil shortages and all the serious problems facing our earth right now–we should be making it easier for people to ride bikes, not harder. And Susan you definitely over-reacted and made what was a close call suddenly a very dangerous situation. Still, he shouldn’t have spit on your car or called you names–very disrespectful and just putting lots of negative energy out into the cosmos. People in general should try to be nicer to each other. Or we are all just f*cked. Things are going to get worse before they get better. We all have to do our part.
Susan, clearly this guy you describe was a jerk. You used your car to impress him with how you felt about how you felt; you crossed the line doing that. Making bicyclists register their bikes is nuts. Will they need to take a driving course, take a test, and renew their registration annually? Would five year old children need to register their bikes? Do you think the DMV is interested?
I’m ashamed to be related to you, fellow Sicilian.
You are an idiot for for following him and instigating the heckling. If you would have just ignored his illegal action, then you would not have needed to attempt to CRUSH him in between two cars.
Let him run stop signs and ride without a helmet, eventually he will be hit by a car and be left in a hospital with major brain damage.
You in no way had no right to do what you did. And you are right SFPD should waste their time writing tickets to curly haired snakes and brakeless cyclists. They dont need to arrrest the rapists and gang members in the Mission.
Susan Dyer Reynolds your proved by your actions that you have no sense at all.
If that cyclist would have run into your SUV and been injured, would you still have posted this? I’m shocked that you’re willing to blog about your own criminal behavior, complete with your full name and email address. This article describes the elitist and entitled view of the worst kinds of motorists beautifully. I thank you for that. It’ll be quite useful in future illustrations.
Rather than rise above the alleged boorish behavior of an isolated cyclist, Susan proudly details how she gets down and wallows in the filth at his level. I fail to understand how one can impress proper road etiquette on a cyclist by chasing them down and attempting to assault them with a 2,000 lb. deadly weapon.
I don’t deny that there are cyclists out there who break rules and ride stupidly. But I am willing to wager there are far more pedestrians and far, far more car drivers who break laws and walk/drive stupidly. If we all were to react with the venomous, puerile, vengeful spirit Ms. Reynolds demonstrates, rather than by driving defensively and leading by example, our roads would be nothing but blood-soaked carnage.
Next time you use your vehicle to teach a cyclist a lesson you could end up doing five years in prison.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/cyclist-sentenced.html
Why did you write this article? Are you proud of your actions? Do you not realize that you were lucky that nothing went wrong? Have you considered how it would have ruined your life if you had seriously injured that cyclist? What if he couldn’t have stopped in time? His head might have gone through your rear window. “Sicilian blood” is not an excuse for what appears to be an anger management problem, which I am unfortunately all too familiar with. Please consider what could have happened and how you will prevent such situations from happening in the future. The first step, based on your other articles, might be to keep your comments to yourself when you’re driving.
I’m assuming Ms. Dyer Reynolds was driving her American car (that is, on the left side of the vehicle) and the cyclist was in the bike/shared lane to her right, which means that during the FOUR documented times she rolled her window down to interact verbally with the cyclist, she was turned towards her passenger window and NOT looking at the road in front of her at all, for which she presumably passed a road test for the privilege of endangering everyone else on the road in this fashion. That she then went on to righteously describe her choices, as though they would seem sane to anyone, makes me wonder if she really knows what “motorists behaving badly’ actually means in English.
If you lived in Los Angeles, you would be charged with menacing a bicyclist under the city’s new bicyclist anti-harassment law. Hopefully San Francisco passes a similar law to get you off the street.
You really are full of yourself, thinking you did the right thing by chasing down the cyclist and then patting yourself on the back for not mowing him down. What an angel you are.
Would love to hear Curly’s side of this story – I’m sure it is a bit different. Wonder how he would describe you (would he be kinder than you with the scrawny, pale, …).
Even with only your word of the account, you are the one that comes off awful. Curly may be stupid and rude, but he is only going to kill himself or grow up. You on the other hand… no hope.
What’s next? Running down jaywalkers? Try to get some self awareness – and peace.
Wow, very classy Susan. Way to ‘teach’ that cyclist a lesson. Escalating violence with an attempt to injure that man’s life with your car really showed *him* something.
As a 45 year old who commutes by bicycle to work, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen illegal motorist behavior that endangers people around them. But that doesn’t mean I’ll key their car or pound on their hood when I catch up to them. And if I took down their license number, do you think the police would do anything about it?
If you are really concerned about safety and congestion in the city and how you can more easily find a parking space for your precious BMW, you should be encouraging more people to get out on bikes rather than berating them. As far as safety is concerned, I’d encourage you to read the response from the SFBC on where the SFPD should focus their limited enforcement resources: http://www.sfbike.org/main/getting-enforcement-right/
I don’t like someone calling me names, much less spitting at me. If I was hunting and someone started yelling at me or even spit at me I would not fire a warning shot near their head and tell them that they’re lucky I didn’t shoot them. I know you think you’re taking advantage of some sort of teachable moment or something but our egotism is blinding you to the fact that someone in a car can easily kill a cyclist. All it takes is one moment of poor judgment, like the one you yourself described above.
I drive and I cycle. I do both almost every day. I have seen a friend hit by a van (on purpose) and left on the side of the road with a broken collarbone. The driver sped off. We didn’t get their plate. This was retaliation because another cyclist we were with yelled at the van driver.
I have never felt an urge to “teach a cyclist a lesson” by threatening them with my car. You ought to be arrested for risking this poor man’s life, no matter how rude, irritating, or irresponsible with his own he is.
Sorry, that should read “your egotism”.
Saturday afternoon I was driving my nephew and brother in law past Tomales Bay on our way to Healdsburg. They asked me to pull over so they could take photos. There were lots of bike racers going the other way, we did not get in anyone’s way on either side of the road. One of the bike racers yelled “f-ing tourists!” at them as he whizzed by. Way to encourage spending and welcome visitors, guy. And so brave!
You’re lucky he was not the crazy with the gun you were presuming to lecture him about. You’re also lucky you didn’t trigger his fight or flight response and get pulled out of your BMW by your hair.
The cyclist is wrong for blowing the stop sign, and the state of California is wrong for allowing Susan the privilege to drive.
Susan, if I saw you doing this I’d take your plate and report you to the police. Hope you get arrested next time.
what you did by “trapping” him with your SUV is sick, and just as crazy as you claim someone else would have been in their car. had he not been able to come to a “screeching” stop he would have slammed into you or the parked car you trapped him with, and he would have been injured badly. to claim he’s the douche, i think you have that backwards.
while his running the stop sign might have been wrong, your decision to persue him, just to tell him he was wrong (which i’m certain he knew) was crazy and unjustifiable. i hope you learn your lesson
Commit a road rage and be proud of it…
Faith in humanity is lost.
He spat at your car so you pinned him in place with tons of gleaming, hard, potentially lethal metal and glass. You, madame, must consider seeking therapy.
@Susan
I’m sorry you were spat at and hope you don’t think that all cyclists are like that. But I disagree with you on the matter of license plates for bicycles.
“Had he been in a car, I could have gotten his license plate number, but on a bicycle, he was as anonymous as he was arrogant.”
If license plates meant that traffic laws were always either respected or enforced, then our roads would either be truly civilised or the prisons full of rogue drivers.
In any case, you’d got better than a license plate – you’d got traces of his DNA all over your windows which the police could have used to identify “Curly”. Too bad you washed it off.
As I incredulously read this article from the UK on the crest of Olympic euphoria!
Here is Yet another driver in a big car totally unaware of their surroundings “Bikes don’t come out of no-where” unless being ridden by Olympic Cyclists.
So in order to make up for you failure to observe the roads correctly and to make up for your spatial awareness shortfallings you chose to use your car as a weapon in the knowledge that had your screw up been done with another car it would have been a crash or a semi you’d probably be in a real bad way.
And then you are dumb enough to use a column to write about your idiotic exploits & then attack cyclists as a group.
Get off your high horse you are not Royalty and just ‘Cause you drive a beemer you don’t own the roads as you’ve got way too much cash visit a local craftsman, support an American made product, they’ll build you a nice custom Bicycle then get out on it and enjoy the freedom and health benefits it brings to you, it may even curb your anger issues before you end up in the Pokey!
Looks like you had your own case of road rage going. You felt emboldened because you were in the SUV and he was on a little bike. I’m sure similar incidents have happened to with other car drivers, did you case them down and threaten them too. Like you warned him the next one you case down might just be a little crazier than you and he to could shoot you or walk over and drag your ass out of the vehicle and beat it senseless. So I suggest you get your anger in check. It’s just as likely that you did a rolling stop and didn’t see him and you were the one in the wrong. If you had come to a complete stop you most likely would have at least seen him approaching the intersection and be able to see that he wasn’t stopping.
Why is everyone referring to blowing a stop sign as a minor infration? Two people could have been seriously hurt! Luckily Susan was able to slam on her brakes!
I’m with this Susan! If I almost hit/killed someone who flew through a stop sign I would be scared then pissed. Then to be flipped off, my fire would be lite too! Who spits? I’m mean really all of you bad mouthing this lady are going to say you would not be compelled to react? What if someone spit at your wife or daughter, Husband or son?
Okay the pursuit of the idiot is taking it far only because teaching an adult manners was the job of this fellows parents. And if his parents didn’t do this job or did and this young man chooses to conduct himself this way! I bet he is single. I wonder if they run around cussing people out, spitting ect. ? Shame on this ill mannered creep!
I’m sure one day his wreck-less bike riding will get him hit.
Then guess all you band wagon jumpers will again be blaming the driver for hitting the stupid bike rider who can’t follow the laws of the road.!!!
I didn’t know riding a bike came with such entitlement?
Simply put… She’s right. Bicycles are vehicles, bicyclists are drivers. The City of San Francisco has basically created this problem by pumping hundreds of millions in to engineering segregated facilities, ignoring basic cyclist instruction, and enforcing the current law. This rider was a scofflaw cyclist, and I’m sure she had the best of intentions initially, but grew weary of the verbal, and then physical assault. Methinks you’d all get out from under your tax burdens with a couple hundred people a month taking this class: http://cyclingsavvy.org/about/cyclingsavvy-origins-and-principles/
Simply put, she is wrong. Escalating violence is never the answer. And as far as who gets injured by what traffic in the city of SF, take a deep breath and consider that there were 3,847 injuries involving cars on cars, 899 injuries on pedestrians by cars and (wait for it) 31 injuries caused by bicycles. Somehow a few stop sign running cyclists isn’t the real danger to public health here.
(Source:http://www.sfbike.org/main/the-truth-about-tickets/)
Now ask yourself – what’s the *real* menace on our streets?
I can’t even believe you wrote this story down and thought you would come across as the innocent victim. At least you had the guts (if not the brains) to admit how you assaulted the guy with your BMW. That this is published in the Marina Times is the cherry on top of this bad joke.
While i don’t agree with the actions of what she did, i don’t completely disagree with her. it’s people like this rogue rider that give good or proper cyclist a bad reputation. I’m not going to say that my temper hasn’t gotten the best of me to speak my mind when i pass by someone like this rider, but i’ve never purposely chased them down or blocked them in. I can’t believe there are so many people are defending this piece of trash for his improper actions that range from blowing through a stop sign, to spitting on her car then once he gets confronted backs off then he himself proceeds to fuel the fire by more spitting and then talk his trash from across the street.
Is this our argument to the cities across America to become more bike friendly? Build our specific bike paths so we don’t have to be law breaking citizens that blow through stop lights or mow down pedestrians like was stated in a previous article? We cyclist need to show the same amount of respect that we would like on the roads. I agree we’re at a disadvantage because of our numbers in both weight and car/bike ratio, but when will people stop defending the other guy who is also in the wrong.
We invite readers to send any further comments to letters@marinatimes.com. We welcome thoughtful responses, even if they are critical, and we’ll publish a selection of them in our September issue.
Why close down comments when people still want to comment? Not going your way?
The irresponsible behavior of bicyclists is the focus. The lack of protection for pedestrians the central issue. If you support bikes, don’t attack Susan, speak up, to your fellow bicyclists.