Originally uploaded by brendan61
It is the morning of day 36 in the year without cars and I realized that I missed the one month mile stone. I am now more than 1/12th of the way along. It has been a busy month at the store and these days pretty much all I do is work. It's a good thing I love my job!
In the picture above is Cathy patiently waiting while I snapped a shot of a huge traffic jam on Route 80 around 6:30PM. Knowing that traffic on all the roads in town would be a disaster we decided to ride our breakfast bikes into town to go to the hardware store for a new toilet handle. It's amazing how adding a bike ride into the mix turns a mundane chore into a fun adventure. From our vantage point on the bridge we could look down on all the unhappy drivers trapped in their cars. One guy in his car actually flipped us the bird as he slowly passed under us. A passing truck with two gentlemen inside motioned for Cathy to lift her shirt when she gave the universal sign for "blow your horn" by holding her closed fist in the air and giving two short pumps. She obliged them by reaching over and lifting my shirt instead. The guys in the truck cracked up and blew the horn. Good fun.
Before we got to this part of the ride, while riding in town, we almost got run over by a women who failed to stop for a stop sign. We were in the perpendicular lane getting ready to turn left and her poor driving forced us to swing wide barely missing getting hit. She pulled around in the direction we were going and parked her car so we decided we would have a chat with her. When I asked her why she did what she did she said that sun glare prevented her from seeing us. Huh? I said "so what you are saying is that you blew the stop sign and accelerated into the intersection because sun glare prevented you from seeing?" The woman started becoming belligerent at this point and when I asked her how she would feel if someone offered this excuse for running over one of her children she screamed "well no one got hit, did they?". This time, I thought to myself.
One thing I have learned since beginning my project is that people are much worse drivers than I realized. It's kind of shocking actually to see people being so careless in the operation of a powerful machine that has so much destructive capability. From this new perspective I wonder how it is that more people are not being killed or maimed by careless driving.
And finally, in my first month without cars I saved about $80 in gas (I used my bike for about 500 miles worth of transportation) and I lost 7 pounds.
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