I don't like dwelling on the negative, but, hey, a few days ago I came as close as I've ever come to getting hit by a car. And it was absolutely 100% the car's fault. And this was the second time this happened, in almost the same way.
I went for a ride out to the suburbs on Monday, which was a national holiday. (For some reason commemorating or recognizing the military coup in the 70's, '76 I think.) I left around 2, and the roads were very quiet. I took Juan B. Justo, a great big road with not so many lights that leads out of town, and it was no problem -- nice and empty, like most sundays. Coming back, though, the road was quite crowded, and cars were driving aggressively as usual. It think people were coming back from vacation, because it had been a 5-day weekend.
Near-accident was simple -- I'm riding along at a good clip on my tank of a mountain bike, 13-14 mph, and a car turns in front of me to make a right. Going fast, clearly trying to "beat" me through the intersection. But, swear to god, there was about a meter, meter and a half maybe, between my front tire and the corner of the car that cut me off. Which, at 14mph, is not very much at all. I am a very aware, kind of paranoid, rider, and so I managed to break really hard, and I just barely missed the back side of the car -- less than a foot.
I was actually shaken up by this, and got off the big street and took the less direct (and frequently cobblestoned) side streets home.
All I could do was shake my fist at the car as it sped away. I could see that it was an older woman driving, with what looked like a family in the car. So macho driving is not limited to the males of the species here.
My earlier near-accident was indeed an example of macho driving, the worst kind of macho driving. In that case, I was at the interesection of Libertador, a giant through avenue, and the General Paz, the ring freeway which forms the boundary of the Capital Federal. Most of the cars were turning onto the freeway, so the only way I could get through the intersection was to jump the light and gun through the intersection before the cars took off. Standard urban biking, not dangerous, not particularly aggressive -- just getting the hell out of the way, essentially.
But, you know, get a young argentine male (futbol fan, no doubt) behind the wheel, and he doesn't like a guy on a bike (a dork wearing a helmet, no less) getting out in front of him. So even though i got a good head start through this big intersection, this guy accelerated hard and pulled past me and cut right in front of me. Again, I had to break really hard to avoid slamming into the passenger door. And I am a seriously, seriously skilled urban cyclist. I can't imagine how amateurs deal with driver behavior like this. (Although amateurs probably wouldn't jump the light and gun it across the intersection.)
Both of these drivers put my safety (and life) at an unreasonable risk. Especially the later guy, he couldn't possibly have saved even a full second by "beating" me through the intersection. The woman, maybe she had some other crazy driver on her tail. But she could still have braked a little and let me through the intersection.
So what's to take away from all this, besides "fuck you people!"? As I said before, it's a kind of culture, the road culture here, and it changes slowly. I guess sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago US road culture was full of carnage, and probably devoid of consideration for other drivers and pedestrians and cyclists. So our road culture evolved. And here in Argentina, oh, I guess this particular aspect of culture hasn't evolved so much. So if I'm going to keep cycling here, I just have to accept it and be careful.
As a nice quantitative example of the "inseguridad vial" here, check out this nice graph showing traffic fatalities per million cars on the road:
No comments:
Post a Comment