The new bike lane on 10th St. has increased the number of cyclists (winter and summer) using that route, has reduced the number of collisions, and the impact on motor vehicle traffic has been negligible, but the Calgary Sun thinks the city should just tear it down because the number of cyclists using it per day isn’t enough for them.

It’s almost as if a single, isolated bike lane isn’t going to result in huge numbers of cyclists in and of itself, and that infrastructure of the like needs to be expanded to make it more of a feasible option before you start seeing results like that. But if “not enough bikers off the bat” is a good enough reason to shut down a bike lane while the city is just barely beginning to catch up with other cities in terms of cycling infrastructure, then I guess that’s your prerogative…

So, like, the Calgary Transit website doesn’t say anything about shuttle times tomorrow with the C-Train being down over the weekend so I don’t know when the first shuttle runs which is important because I need to be at work really early tomorrow, so I call 3-1-1 and tell the lady who picked up the phone my tale of sorrow, and even she was just generally unimpressed with how poorly CT communicates with its riders and other city agencies. Like, she didn’t even know that part of the LRT line was just straight out shut down. So we had this short, cathartic conversation about how dumb they are and left on very pleasant terms, and it sort of made up for the cluster it’s been getting around via transit this weekend. 

Not even wrong.

Some guy in an SUV peeled into an oncoming lane to try to get around me just as I was rolling up to the stop line of an intersection on my bike at a red light, almost pushing me out of the lane. I assert myself, and my personal safety, by yelling and telling him to get back and he gets mad at me. What fucking world do you live in where you get mad at someone because you almost run them over, and they tell you to, “Ummm… please don’t”? 

After I yelled at him to stop what the fuck he was doing he rolls down his window and starts yelling at me to ride on the sidewalk, which isn’t even an argument, so whatever. As an attempt at an argument, “ride on the sidewalk” is so far off the mark that, as they put it in the scientific community, it’s not even wrong. It has no bearing on how road use should be dictated. Then he honks at me after the light turned green and actually had room to pass me. Like, how feeble. Did he seriously drive away thinking, “*honk! *honk!… Well, I certainly got the best of that exchange”?

Anyways, it doesn’t happen too often, but every once in a while there’s a special person out there that just blows my goddamn fuckin’ mind.