Stop! In The Naaaaame Of OW!

I’m a college student. To save money, I drive to a friend’s house near campus, park, and bike the rest of the way instead of paying for a park-and-ride pass that starts at a ridiculously far away location. 

Due to the traffic, student driving, and general chaos in our town near the university, it’s a given that if you bike, you will eventually get hit by a car. It all boils down to how severe the accident is. After six years of biking at least twice a week, nearly every week, I let my guard down for a moment and got hit. 

A car was pulling up to a stop sign while I was in the bike lane and, a bit annoyed at a previous encounter with a driver parked and idling in the bike lane a block back, I mentally told myself, “This guy is going to stop.” A moment later, as I was perfectly aligned with his oncoming bumper, I thought, “Aw, s***, he’s still coming.”

The next minute saw me extricating myself from my mangled bike, several onlookers running over to check on me, and the panicked driver getting out and yelling about not seeing me at all.

After doing a quick check of myself and only finding a badly gashed hand and a scraped knee, I sat up and, in a moment of shock and anger, spat the first thing that came to mind.

Me: “Dude, don’t you know what a f****** stop sign is?! God d***!”

A police report, a trip to the ER, and an insurance scuffle later, I got a nice card post-insurance claim from the driver. He apologized for running the stop and offered to pay for my bike repairs. He also included, word for word, the definition of a stop sign from Wikipedia.