Dear Bicyclists : I Totally Hate Your Guts

The other morn­ing Pey­ton, the baby, woke up early, and, being the con­sci­en­tious father, I decided that rather than hav­ing him wake up every­body else in the house that he and I would go and drive around for awhile. It was approach­ing 7 am and I was tired, hav­ing already been up with him for an hour, and I wanted to do some­thing with him besides say “No!” and grab things out of his hands before they entered his mouth. So I grabbed the keys to the truck, loaded him up and we headed out for a morn­ing drive around the lake.

“The lake” is White Rock Lake, and peo­ple of all shapes and sizes go there in the very early morn­ing hours to run, walk, jog and ride bikes. It’s a lovely tran­quil place to just drive (or run, walk, jog or ride bikes) around the lake and look out at the water. Noah loves going there to feed ducks and also try his hand at (very ama­teur­ish) fish­ing. I like to go look at the gigan­tic houses and just while away a lit­tle time before I real­ize how much money I’m blow­ing on gas.

So Pey­ton and I were dri­ving and I’d come to the south­ern por­tion of the lake where the road diverges from the lake­side and I was out in res­i­den­tial land again and there’s a pack of about 20 bicy­clists com­ing towards me. I knew from learn­ing to ride a bike that the safest way to ride is towards traf­fic in a sin­gle file line, but these bicy­clists were only doing the for­mer and not the lat­ter. Because of this there was a giant swarm of bikes and we were on a col­li­sion course with each other.

But I kept dri­ving towards them. “They’ll real­ize they’re going to be killed and they’ll avoid me, the larger vehi­cle.” This did not happen.

I drove on, approach­ing them at about 35 mph. They kept on com­ing straight at me.

I got to about 15 feet from them before I steered clear of them. I also gave them a very notice­able fin­ger, let­ting them know that I was num­ber one and they weren’t.

The arro­gance of some peo­ple! Where do they get off think­ing that nat­u­rally I, the auto­mo­bile dri­ver, am going to avoid them just because they are on bicy­cles? “We are exer­cis­ing and you are con­tribut­ing to mak­ing Dal­las one of the fat­test cities in Amer­ica,” was what I assumed they were think­ing as they ped­aled on.

So bicy­clists, this is your warn­ing. I will take you arro­gant muthas down!