Living The Simulated Life

A couple of mornings ago, I was browsing social media and came across a video of a bicyclist being clipped by a car. The rider was okay and all were in full dudgeon to catch the driver and see him punished. An odd thing I noticed about the video is that the biker was within an arms-length of the center of what looked like a kind of highway. Not saying it is okay to run people over, but WTF is a cyclist doing out in the middle of a high speed roadway? He may have a right to do this (or may not) but getting hit by a car is predictable, inevitable and he might not be so lucky to walk away from the next instance. There will be a next instance if he habitually rides in the middle of a road.

That very day, I was driving to work in our Yukon XL and there is a place where I make a left turn, which is something of a hard-left, say 100 degrees rather than the usual 90. Making it worse is that this is a busy main road and right after that intersection, the continuing road curves to the right. You have to do the whole turn pretty fast and/or be prepared to stop suddenly if an oncoming car appears from around the corner. With my turn signal on and half-way through the turn, I saw something to my left out of the corner of my eye--a bicyclist! He was going about 25 mph and cut in front of me! I had hardly reached the brake and he had already gone past me into the main road. I suspect he had the timing down and figured there would be space between us since we were both turning left. Still, I don't cut through corners and this is a large vehicle, so I doubt he cleared me by even two feet. Since he was to my left, he could likely see down the main road better than I could and cars move fast through there, so he could easily have been flattened by an oncoming car.