Flutterby™! : Driver harassing cyclists, on video 2012-09-20 14:44:22.461108+00

Driver harassing cyclists, on video

2012-09-20 14:44:22.461108+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Shadow forwarded along Outside: Colorado Driver Honks at Cyclists in Attempt to Make Road Rage History:

This might be the longest series of unnecessary honks in the history of driver-versus-cyclist confrontations. An older male driver in a Ford SUV, license plate Colorado 893 EKG, slowed behind two bikers out for a Sunday ride near Longmont, Colorado, and laid on his horn for an awfully long time. He ignored the fact that the cyclists rode single file on the edge of the road. He honked so incessantly that one of the two cyclists ran out of memory while recording a video of the incident on his phone.

Here's the original YouTube video.

Finally, the perpetrator was ticketed:

James Ernst was ticketed on two counts of misdemeanor harassment, impeding the flow of traffic and improper use of a horn or warning, according to the Colorado State Patrol.

It took me a while, and a whole bunch of seeing related links fly by on FaceTwitCaPlus, to bother linking to this, and partially because all of us who bike have had some asshole do a variant of this. Maybe for not this long, but it's happened. And until the guy got ticketed, there wasn't any closure on it. It was just another asshole in an SUV harassing cyclists. This one got caught on video, but this shit happens every single weekend, all around the country.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-20 19:43:08.448628+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

So I posted that last comment on a walk downtown, then started paying attention. So far we're at 3 out of 19, and one of the drivers that stopped did so to check his text messages. The rest all slowed down and rolled through.

I'll take the stop sign complaint seriously when I see an an equivalent ratio of autos actually coming to a full stop.

I'd take it seriously now if I hadn't been hit from behind by a car when I did observe a stop sign while on a bicycle. Momentum is our only defense, if we stop, we're sitting ducks.

Anyone with Colorado plates would know that the smaller country roads in Boulder County are filled with cyclists on a nice weekend afternoon. And that there are plenty of larger throughfares, like CO 119 and US-36. The particular road they were on is one of the lesser traveled paved roads in the area. There are unpaved roads that see more traffic. In other words, cyclists are everywhere in that area but this driver must have gone out of his way to find cyclists to harass in a more secluded fashion.