School has been in session for a few weeks now, and with the weather getting slowly—oh so slowly—cooler, I decided to commence the start of September by attempting to bike more. Biking to campus had always seemed ideal to me, but the overwhelming fear of getting hit by a car has long dampened my enthusiasm for making the switch from driving to cycling, especially when one factors in the atrociousness of Starkville drivers, which really is taken to such an extreme level as to almost become an art form.
Though the reasons for biking to campus (and other areas) are obvious, and there appear to be more bikers than ever cycling around Starkville, I can’t quite get over the fear of hitting the road and peddling my way to get coffee because at every moment I fully expect to be flattened by an oncoming truck or mowed down by a negligent driver. And before you scoff, it has been my unfortunate pleasure to know not one, but two different friends get hit by a car in the Cotton District in the past three weeks while in the bike lane. I had always been under the impression that the bike lane was a safe place, a strip of road where the white line separating biker from a speeding wad of metal was something like a force field of sorts. This naïve belief was quickly proven false after listening to tales of drivers neglecting to make complete stops, effectively turning their vehicles into battering rams.
To add insult to injury there isn’t even really one continuous bike lane. There are these random stretches (such as the one leading from downtown into campus) and some others here and there, but for the most part riding a bike involves being on actual streets and intersections, where your average car-driver doesn’t take too kindly to some impudent biker pedaling at his or her measly 20 mph pace on Gillespie.
I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to speculate that some of the most virulent road rage is almost exclusively directed onto cyclists, due to the reasonable fear of accidentally hitting them and the not so reasonable anger that a bike is simply not quite as fast as a car.
Biking is fun, cheap and a good form of exercise, and it’s understandable that a biker has a duty to himself or herself and those around him or her to take in their surroundings and to be on the defensive, especially since in a collision between car and bike, the bike will never come out on top. However, Starkville could do some things to make it a bit easier on those choosing to cycle, such as putting in some more bike lanes and trails for people to ride on. And it wouldn’t hurt if people decided to follow basic driving laws, such as making full stops at stop signs, signaling turns with their blinker and, oh, I dunno, maybe not hitting bikers with their cars.
