Close Calls

Some wag once said, "There are only two groups of people. Those who stereotype and those who don't."

One of the not-so-great outcomes of the explosive growth in cycling here in Portland has been a increasingly nasty public debate dividing us into two groups of people - cyclists and drivers.

Cyclists, so the stereotype goes, regularly flaunt the traffic laws. They run red lights and stop signs, ride on the wrong side of the road, don't use lights at night, and so on, all the while carrying on with a self-assured smugness that they are better than everyone else because they're not burning fossil fuels.

The Driver stereotype says that all people piloting a car - no, make that a Hummer H2 - are cell-phone yakking, Starbucks swilling, self-absorbed sacks of crap who care nothing about society and even less about those cyclists who are jamming up the streets.

Reality, of course, is that neither of these pigeonholes has very many people in them. As a cyclist, my experience with drivers - at least in Portland proper - is that most of them are very attentive and that the last thing they want to do is to hit a cyclist.

As a driver, I do my best to watch for cyclists. But I do admit to getting a bit pissy when I see cyclists doing some or all of the dumb stuff listed above.

I will fully admit that I've done dumb stuff behind both steering wheel and handlebars. Of course, making a mistake while driving carries a much greater potential for disaster than while riding. But screwing either one up can mean serious injury or death.

So, in an attempt to get me to focus better on how I both ride my bike and drive my car, I've set up a scoreboard of sorts in the space to the right. When I have a close call on my bike that is another driver's fault, that's a point in the "driver" category. But, when I screw up on my bike - rolling a stop sign is my main weakness - I'm gonna own that too. And finally, when I make a mistake in my car - god forbid - that goes on the scoreboard too.

We'll see how this goes for the next couple of months, especially when the weather gets nicer and I start riding to work more. It will be interesting to see which category gets the highest score. Tonight didn't get the other motorists off to a good start; I nearly got whacked by two different pickup truck drivers at the same intersection. They both failed to yield the intersection to me when they had a stop sign.