My Bad

A month or so on, my bike crash injuries are mostly healed, and I did drop off information on the urban bike skills class for the Jamie Foxx-looking guy, as promised. I’m usually horrible with faces (as well as names, not to mention anything else that requires the use of the memory, other than real or perceived injuries to myself), but he was easy to pick out again.

By way of a souvenir, I will have a small scar on my elbow—it looks like a smirking little mouth—plus one on my knee, and I’m still waiting for one bruise to fade, but my knee has stopped clicking, and I think everything is basically fine.

A couple of weeks after the crash, when I had some idea of what the expenses would amount to, I called the fellow who knocked me down, and asked him how he came to hit me. He said he doesn't think of that red light as being a place where cyclists need to stop, since it isn't a true four-way intersection, so he was just sailing along.

That was the only part of the conversation that was at all testy. He asked, "Did you notice no other cyclists were stopped?" and I answered, "The ones who obey the law stop. The light applies to us, too."

I realized he was suggesting it was my fault the crash occurred, or that he might even have felt he had suffered a wrong: "Why did this darn person stop right in front of me?" He, like me, received a variety of painful injuries. He said he was bruised so badly it was difficult for him to get out of bed.

I had planned to ask him to take the urban bike skills class (what the League of American Bicyclists calls Road I), which I highly recommend, and which is what made me so scrupulous about red lights, but he had already decided to do that. Before I even mentioned it, he said that he'd realized he needed to improve his habits, so he'd signed up for the class.

I said that I wanted to apologize again for my uncivil remarks; they were spontaneous, but I felt kind of bad about them afterwards. He said it was OK.

I listed my injuries, told him what I’d spent on fixing the bike and myself, and asked him to reimburse me for what it cost to fix my bicycle, which was $105.90. He thought for a moment and said he would do that, and in just a couple of days, his check arrived in the mail.

My mother asked if there is a way for cyclists to signal a stop, and loyally said that despite being 2500 miles away at the time of the incident, she was prepared to testify that I had windmilled my arms before applying my brakes.

One would think that cyclists would be watching what is in front of them pretty carefully out of self-interest, if nothing else. In a car, if you space out and hit something that isn't big enough to register as another motor vehicle, well, no big deal (for you). But on a bicycle, you can't hit much of anything at all without risking your own safety.

There is indeed a signal cyclists can use to indicate an imminent stop—fortunately, it does not require waving both arms—but one would hope not to have to employ it before stopping at a red light, for goodness’ sake.