Please don’t honk your horn!
Honking your horn at a cyclist is not just rude, it’s unsafe!
The premise of this discussion is about drivers who honk their horn as they pass cyclist. I live in a fairly rural area and it never ceases to amaze me how some (a minority for sure) can be so inconsiderate of others. Today a semi came by me and honked from the time he was about a hundred feet back until he had passed me. The act was simple harassment, there was no other explanation. I was biking down the highway about a foot off the gravel shoulder and a foot right of the white line that designates the shoulder when the incident happened. I did not get the license plate number, or I would have called the authorities (cell phones are so handy).
Why does this bother me. I am an experience cyclist who has dealt with poor drivers on nearly a daily basis since I was in grade school, I know how not to react in such a case, but other cyclist do not. Just before summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was talking to another kid and he asked me about a bike route I had taken before in Door County, Wisconsin a popular tourist spot which drew thousands of vacationers each summer. I told him it was a beautiful route, but taking the main road was dangerous. Unfortunately, you had to take the main road at a couple points. What I heard about his trip has haunted me to this day.
He was biking along the main highway on the right hand side of the road when a motor home who was about to pass him honked. He turned his head to see the vehicle and when he did his shoulders turned, which in turn drew the left arm towards him causing his bike to vier to the left. His death was instant. The driver did not give him enough room, three feet of clearance is the law, and he honked but did not give the kid time to react, and a son, a brother, a friend was stripped away from those who loved him.
The driver was reckless and probably just wanted to get started on his vacation. The man who honked at me today was just trying to do his job and get his load of whatever to wherever it needed to go. I was just going to work to earn a little money to take care of my family.
Driving rural roads
It wasn’t long after I moved here from Milwaukee that I started noticing that I was becoming more patient with slow moving vehicles. In Milwaukee a slow moving vehicle was some idiot who did not know how to drive in the “big city”. Here they were farmers just doing their job, or an elderly couple I knew from town out for a little ride. They became real people. In Milwaukee life was fairly anonymous. Here, nothing seems anonymous. If someone doesn’t know who you are, they can easily find out.
I doubt the driver this morning was from around here (I am making this assumption but don’t know for sure) because I was anonymous to him, someone he would likely never see again. Most semis are very courtious and go out of their way to pass me safely as I am sure they do to the farmers driving their tractors and the amish in their buggies. But then there are those few who just don’t seem to get it.