💾 Archived View for quasivoid.net › gemlog › 2021-04-15-falling-over.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Sometimes, you find yourself in a situation where you are just about to tip over into failure, and there is nothing you can do about it. You knew this would happen, you know exactly what mistakes you made that lead you to this point, all that can be done now is close your eyes and accept your fate.
It's a cute metaphor but I'm being literal. When I started using clipless pedals, I had a few falls on my neighborhood street before getting the hang on them, but hadn't had any issues since. I'm confident using them, I see my stops ahead of time and can get clipped in again pretty easily when pedalling out of intersections.
Accidents will happen, though. Today, I was on the bike path, and wanted to turn around to take a picture of something. I don't like making super tight turns if I don't have to, so I waited until I saw one of the inlets from one of the neighboorhood sidewalks, which offer a lot of space. They are also pretty steep, I think something like 30%. Which is fine.
I thought I could get up it without going down a gear since it was only two or three meters of climbing. I nearly get to the top, but I did not start with enough speed to compensate for the high gear I was in. I could barely keep going. Eventually, I couldn't keep going.
I am attached to my bike. If I were to unclip now, the situation would probably worsen, as I likely would not have enough power to keep myself from rolling backwards. The only thing I may do is accept my fate and fall over. I make the bike fall on my drive side, so that I could plant my elbow in the dirt and soften the impact a little bit.
Four pedestrians watched it happen. I laughed it off and started moving again.
There is a highway which I do not like taking left hand turns on my bike, due to how busy and fast the road is. I take the crosswalk instead, which freezes the intersection, naturally. Most people wait like normal people at the red light.
Today, one person, instead of waiting at the light, takes the right hand turn lane, swerves in and out of the through-crosswalk, and back into the through road. Obviously, the dude ran a red light, but did so in an incredibly insane way that's really on a level above normally running a red.
In this state, you are allowed to make right turns on a red light. You effectively treat it as a stop sign, going if it is safe to go and there is no one to yield right of way to. This guy takes a "right"-on-red, a "u-turn", and another "right"-on-red. But obviously, they were barely right hand turns at all, and it was barely a u-turn. He just swerved over a crosswalk while going through a right-turn only lane. I had already finished crossing the street and was staring at the rear of this car in disbelief.