the ryan king

Now that the hosting move is over, back to the regular intermittent blogging.

Today’s topic: riding a bike in San Francisco.

As part of my ongoing hipsterization, I’ve recently started riding my bike around SF. I’ve had the bike as long as I’ve lived here, but only recently taken to riding it often. I used to cycle quite a bit (for exercise, not transportation) before moving to SF. Now I ride my bike to get places.

There are some nice benefits to riding– I get to work quicker in the morning (the buses are slow!), I get more exercise, and I have a very natural way of waking up in the morning.

There is one big negative– all those cars on the road. I think every SF cyclist has a story of “almost dying”. I was sure that I’d eventually get one, too. I just didn’t realize it’d be this soon.

That’s right, I “almost died” on Friday.

Here’s how it happened…

I was cycling down market past the Castro, past Octavia and further down the hill, hitting several green lights in a row. For those not familiar with this part of SF, Market street here is a major thoroughfare with lots of traffic, but there are bike lanes going each way.

So, because I hit all of these green lights, I was cruising pretty fast, faster than the car traffic. I as aided by the fact that the right lane was blocked off by construction barrels. Because there was no actual construction work going on, I chose to ride through the barrels to take a shortcut.

At the end of the construction zone was an intersection. Of course, someone wanted to turn right (from the left lane), of course they didn’t look back up the closed lane and of course they didn’t even drive all the way through the lane, they stopped right in my way.

And, of course I couldn’t stop in time. So, I hit the car with my bike, right in the passenger door.

Now, I didn’t it the car very hard, because I was almost able to stop, but I did manage to bug a huge scratch all the way down the side of the car. My bike is absolutely fine. The front wheel is still true and everything.

Ok, so I didn’t really “almost die”, but it could have been worse. Oh, and here’s a diagram explaining what happened…

The lady driving the car pulled over to check and make sure everything was ok. At least she didn’t take off.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under San Francisco, cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.