Share the road–or, y’know, NOT
Run ’em down run ‘em down run ‘em ALLLL down.
Video: Mob of bicyclists surround car, smash windows with brick, chain as driver gets out to confront them. Cops arrest suspect.
Cellphone video caught the moment when a mob of bicyclists surrounded a car on a Houston street last month and proceeded to smash its windshield and rear window with a brick and chain while ramming it and scratching it as the driver got out to confront the group.Police on Monday said they arrested a suspect, KTRK-TV reported.
Any bets on whether the “suspect” hauled in by local Gestapo was the guy in the car? As it happens, it wasn’t this time, but given current societal trends one could easily be forgiven for assuming otherwise.
Herschel Cashin — a lawyer — told the station he was trying to get home when his vehicle was amid dozens of bicyclists on the road.
“They had a big pack in the front and a trail in the back, and I was driving, but you could drive only 15 miles per hour for all the cyclists,” Cashin told KTRK. “I didn’t want to hit the cyclists.”
Which was your first mistake, see: entering into a potential fracas with a large gaggle of self-righteous, imperious, extravagantly obnoxious pricks—who have convinced themselves that they are somehow entitled to prevail in a contest with a 3-4 thousand pound hunk of plastic, rubber, glass, and steel capable of outpacing them by several orders of magnitude at the merest increase of pressure on a footpedal—without making the proper attitudinal adjustments in your own head beforehand.
Voluntarily getting out of the car at all was your SECOND mistake. The car was your only weapon, a quite good and wholly superior one at that, but you surrendered it without a struggle. Wrong, wrong, WRONG.
Video of the confrontation shows bicyclists surround his car — which was stopped on a street — as a brick was thrown through the back window and someone else slapped what appeared to be a bicycle chain on Cashin’s windshield, smashing it, the station said.
Cashin added to KTRK that he’s “not looking for vengeance, but somebody needs to talk to some of these people. I mean, ride on the side of the street, and maybe the city council, the mayor’s office needs to look into it because there might need to be some restrictions on this because this has gotten, gone too far.”
These bicyclists are in my experience shitlibs to the last man Jack of them, pal; “going too far” is who they are, it’s what they do. And just what the hell is so wrong with a little vengeance, anyway?
KRIV-TV said it spoke exclusively with two bicyclists who witnessed the incident, and they said another video preceding the one showing the attack on the car indicates the driver actually was the aggressor.
“He cut in toward the back of the line, and he took off,” Joshua, one of the riders who witnessed the incident, told KRIV. “We told him there are still more people, and he took off striking the biker on the opposite lane.”
Joshua and another witness named Phi told the station that the driver was upset after the group of nearly 400 cyclists stopped traffic while they passed the intersection of South McGregor and Scott Street. They added to KRIV that the driver refused to wait, started speeding between the bicyclists, and hit two people — after which the group surrounded the car.
So, the news isn’t all bad then, the day not a completely unproductive one. Still, 2 (or three) out of a possible 400 is a piss-poor average; stay in the car, correct your thinking, and try harder next time, Mr Cashin.
I rode bicycles for many, many years, even after I had gotten my license to drive, and have nothing against biking per se. Also, as a lifelong avid motorcycle enthusiast, I well know how thoughtless and inattentive auto drivers can be when it comes to any other vehicle smaller than the one they’re in. For anyone on two wheels it’s a real jungle out there, with serious injury or even death lurking around every bend.
But the last fifteen-twenty years or so has seen the rise of a new breed of bicyclist, particularly in urban areas. They gather in huge packs and venture out not on side-streets, country lanes, or in public parks, but on multilane highways and other main arteries right at rush hour, arrogating to themselves roads already overburdened with far more vehicular traffic than they were designed to accommodate—clogging streets, disrupting intersections, worsening the critical-traffic problem—endangering one and all with their selfishness, their aggressiveness and presumption, their total indifference to common courtesy and the rules of the road.
I’ve seen ‘em, and most likely so have you. I’ve had several friends over the years who took part in weekly urban en masse rides, albeit mostly at night; their snickering afterwards about how they’d “gotten all up in the face” of some hapless “square” driving a car who hadn’t gotten out of their way fast enough to suit them was nothing short of insufferable.
They delay folks just trying to get in to work on time or headed home for a nice, quiet dinner with the wife and kids without a care in the world, because hey, those schlubs just aren’t as important as bicyclists are, amIright?
By choosing to ride (almost always illegally) on streets designed and built exclusively for truck, bus, and automobile traffic and not hordes of thoroughfare-clogging assholes perched atop the frailest, flimsiest mode of transportation available short of a pair of wings made from a bunch of feathers glued together with candle-wax, then attacking people who need to get around them to meet whatever schedule they might happen to be on, wantonly wrecking a car the attackee depends on and spent a lot of hard-earned coin to obtain, they forfeit all claim to the moral, philosophical, and legal high ground. By committing such assaults and destruction of private property as if they were themselves invulnerable to any type of self-defensive retaliation on the part of their guiltless victims in the heat of the moment, they forfeit all claim to reasonableness, comity, and good sense.
So if a few of them must be squashed like insects on a windshield by a few justly-incensed motorists so as to teach their bicycling compatriots a little politesse and respect for others—others, mind, who are in control of machinery much bigger, heavier, and more dangerous than they, in their precious Lance Armstrong costumes and dinky-ass helmets, could ever hope to be…well, tough titty for them, I say. They brought it on themselves, and thus richly deserve it as far as I’m concerned.
They like to swagger around in their “wolfpacks” as if they were all Hells Angels or something, but an at-speed introduction to the gnarly chrome teeth of a ’53 Buick grill will surely yank that fluffy l’il rug out from under ‘em with a quickness.
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