I admit it. Rarely do I actually get annoyed enough to throw ‘the one fingered salute’. This morning, it happened three times, on one road, all within the space of about one mile. It was a morning commute, but instead of being in commuter gear, I was in training gear, and moving at a training pace. What does that mean? It means, I wasn’t poking along.

The route this morning was selected because of the timing, my normal route up Highway 9 would have put me in the middle of the Midway Elementary School traffic at Post Rd. as a rule, those are situations that I will avoid because they create stress points for car drivers. Oddly, that stretch of road is plenty wide, and even though it is a 45 mph speed limit, I’ve had almost no negative interactions until the actual light, and the 500 feet from the light to the far end of the school. In that school space, there have been quite a few right hook attempts but that is more or less to be expected. In the interests of not going through there this morning, I elected a back road route that is far less traveled. A route that I was traveling against the flow of rush hour traffic.

So I chose to loop out to Union Hill Rd and come across Shiloh Rd back to Highway 9 well north of the school. You know, doing exactly what drivers say they want cyclists to do. Be courteous, share the road and use roads that aren’t so busy, and fast. So I find myself on Shiloh Rd headed west towards Majors Rd and Highway 9. The speed limit is 30 mph. As you can see from the above recording, I crossed that road at a speed of 21 mph average, with the first speed dip coming at a location where I slipped out of the way to allow two following cars to go around, and the second longer dip where I sat up and soft pedaled the accel/decel lane by the church to allow the two cars to pass there.

Unfortunately, the sections where I didn’t have space to give up, is where the proverbial feces hits the air moving devices that uses spinning blades. Shortly after entering this tight section of road, I was buzzed, and I do mean that in the closest sense of the word, by three vehicles in fairly quick succession. First was a white Chevy truck, who apparently couldn’t be bothered to slow down to near the speed limit, since I was moving at about 25 mph at that point, and wait until the oncoming traffic cleared. At least he had the courtesy not to smoke me out with his diesel until he had completed the pass. I only had to ride it as it was dispersing. Following him was the young female driver in her wine colored Kia mini-SUV. She gets the epic fail, since she was close enough that I felt the passenger side mirror blow past my shoulder. Finally, we had the dark green Oldsmobile. I don’t have a clue what this driver was thinking, since they started to give room, but then decided not to since there was oncoming traffic. Instead of hitting the brake and slowing, this driver seems to think crowding me and oncoming traffic would be a good idea.

Sadly, that last actually terrifies me. The other two, I can deal with, though the frustrate me, and my salute might have been an overreaction, this crowding both approach creates so many risks, and I saw one of them today. The oncoming driver, feeling crowded, dropped the wheels off the edge of the road, at speed, and twitched back into the lane. The two cars passed each other so close they could have swapped paint. It is a situation that leaves me feeling more vulnerable than any other. I can avoid most issues, but this one, I can’t once the driver has made this choice.

The only thing I could have done, was before the incident, I could have removed that option from the drivers menu of choices. In hindsight, on this section of road, I have no choice but to adopt a vehicular cycling lane position, and force the driver to leave the lane to get around me, or to run me over. My innate southern courtesy screams at me that this is rude, and I should be giving up the lane, but my safety dictates that safety wins over courtesy.

Even further though, this is just another example of where doing what drivers think they want cyclists to do actually creates more risks than cyclists behaving like they are cars.