Crash!

I’m afraid I quite inadvertently caused an accident on my walk home from work tonight.  You see, I had reached the point in the road where there is a zebra crossing, a sort of cross-walk where the cars are supposed to slow to a stop and give pedestrians right of way.  Now I never have faith that they will stop on time, so I’m pretty careful to step gingerly into the thing and watch the cars carefully to see if they had any intention of slowing.  The frequency with which they speed through at times is something else.  Now let me also preface this by saying that I’m mystified by bike laws.  The bikes are supposed to ride on the road down the middle or on the side?  I mean, they can’t go as fast as the cars so why ride down the middle?  They are supposed to follow the rules of the cars even though they sometimes also careen along the sidewalks?  Tonight as I reached the zebra crossing, there was a blue car coming and a bicycle riding in the centre of the lane behind the car.  When I stepped into the zebra stripes, the car did the “right” thing and slowed to a halt.  I don’t know where the bicyclist was looking but he somehow did not notice this and crashed into the back of the car.  I then stood there aghast in the zebra crossing unsure of what to do.  I mean, I wasn’t really involved in the crash, just an onlooker whose foot in the stripey section of the road just happened to cause the accident.  The driver got out of the car to check on the cyclist, lying in the road, and the cyclist said “I didn’t think you were going to stop.”  Um.  Okay, the bicyclist who’s trying to do what some say is the “right” thing by riding in the road as though he was a car, and oh yeah who has very little momentum compared with the car (p = mv and m_car >> m_bike), assumed the car was going to careen through the thing.  Actually what’s scary is that the bike would have crashed into me if the car had not been there to stop it.  Thank goodness for small blessings.  But after all you hear of people getting knocked off bikes by careless drivers who don’t see them, it’s slightly amusing to have a bike crashed into a stopped car.  Everyone was okay and I walked home slightly mortified but otherwise convinced that I do not want to ride a bike around here.  The whole pedestrian-bike-car-bus mess is just too complicated.

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