Bike To Work Week or some such bullshit

It's National Bike to Work Week, or some kind of nonsense thing-- like what does that really mean? In my experience, if anything, it means, if you're on a bike, people in cars give you more shit than usual.

In my short and almost totally on the bike path route to work today, here is what I encountered:

The usual four way stop confusion. Are people in Wisconsin just dumb, or are they just dumber, now, everywhere? Four way stop signs seem to really throw people off. There is one really simple thing to remember: whoever gets there first has the right of way! Whether it's a car, a bike, or a pedestrian!

Here is what happens frequently to me. A car will get to a four way stop, and seeing me riding up on my bike, either assuming I'm going to not stop at all, or just to be polite, will not go, and wait for me to go. See, the problem with this is, there is a HUGE percentage of cars who will run the stop sign, or just barely stop. If you're on a bike you HAVE to stop or get run over sooner or later. Next, of the people that stop, I can't assume that they are going to wait for me. If I aggressively proceed, there is a huge percentage of people in cars that will do one of the following things: seethe in anger until they get to a wife or kid to beat; honk angrily, yell, and roar off at full speed; follow me closely yelling obscenities and threatening to kick my ass; shoot at me from the car window. So, really, it's a complicated mess. It is really best to just follow the traffic rules as best you can. I find that the “whoever gets there first has the right of way” thing to be pretty easy to comprehend.

Next, when I got to the ramp from the bike trail up to Oakland Avenue, the top of the trail was closed off for repaving. Of all the weeks of the year to close off something like that, this is an odd one, but I won't over-think that. (Oh, another thing that made me think of is how there are a lot of bike lanes in Milwaukee now, but often they will just end abruptly. It's like, here's your bike lane, aren't we generous? Then suddenly, fuck you! No more bike lane!

The last thing, I'm almost to the office, on the street, going kind of fast to make a green light, and then this woman decides to walk across against the light, while looking at me the whole time. Looking at me in a way that says, you won't dare hit me, I'm crossing the goddamn street. You sometimes see people do that with cars, but not often because they will get killed. But people assume that bikes will stop for you, or I don't know what. It's odd. I get the impression that bikes really make people angry. I have no idea why. If they would ride a bike ever, they would see that it is CARS that make it really difficult for bikes. You have to ride defensively all the time, and even then you are always being confronted with really difficult and stupid situations. A world without cars would be SO EASY, SO PLEASANT to ride a bike in, but it is so far from that to be almost unimaginable.