A Bicyclist Talking on Her Cell Phone While Riding. Incredible.

Bicyclists invoke caution from me. I don’t trust them. They are small, compared to my car, behave erratically and are only protected by the illusion of the air over the paint stripe defining a bike lane.
Driving home the other day, headed west on a four-lane street with a median and a bike lane, I saw a bicyclist. As I focused on the cyclist, she (it was a she, I decided) began wobbling in the bike lane. Finally she wandered outside the bike lane. I hit the brakes. She wobbled some more and finally stopped, holding her right hand to her ear, and looked back toward me.
Talking on the phone! Or suffering from a really sore ear. It was at this time that body shape and face provided the clues that the cyclist was a woman. That the cyclist was a woman is worth noting. But stupidity favors neither gender.
Her behavior both explains my lack of sympathy for the cycling movement and my annoyance at the so-call “ghost bikes,” placed at the scene of a cyclist’s death, designed to induce guilt and sympathy for the cyclist and further the cyclists’ cause in situations such the Bike Wars along narrow King Street in Alexandria, Va., described by F.H. Buckley in the Wall Street Journal’s “Cross Country” column in the November 9 – 10 edition. “When you see the bike activists in your neighborhood,” Buckley says, “Be warned that they tend not to play nice.”