Two- and four-wheelers need to share one road

Editor,

As one of the many two-wheeled UNM students, I would like to speak about my biking experience.

After living in the Duke City as a student for four years (and not owning a car), it is obvious to me that drivers and pedestrians treat bicycles as nuisances.

I can best illustrate this by giving an example from my daily routine. In order to reach my classes, I take Girard Boulevard north, head west on Silver Avenue, and turn right onto Stanford Avenue. It should be a short, carefree ride. For a while, I always started my ride to campus by merging into traffic from my driveway, going up Girard and swinging a left onto Silver.
Easier said than done.

Girard is almost always a busy street with cars parked curbside. Riding a bicycle through the Lead intersection also means that I will usually have a trail of angry commuters behind me beeping, mouths foaming. And then there is the pleasant experience of turning left onto Silver where it is a guarantee that I will be screamed and honked at.

When someone eventually threw a Coke can at my head, screamed “Get on the sidewalk asshole!” and sped off, I thought, “Maybe I will use the sidewalk a little.”

And actually it is not entirely illegal.
According to city ordinance 8-3-3-15, you may not ride the sidewalk if “there is a wide right lane, bike lane, or bike trail adjacent to the direction of travel, or when signs are posted prohibiting bicycles on the sidewalk, or when within a business district.”

For the small section of Girard that I need to pass, none of these restrictions apply.

There is no wide lane (too many parked cars), no bike trail, no signs prohibiting biking, and isn’t a business district (unless you count the drug dealers).

However, on Monday morning upon riding on the mostly vacant sidewalk, I passed a man I see often who I had cartoonishly nicknamed “Speed Demon” because he walks his dogs as slowly as humanly possible. He decided to yell at me, called me a shithead and told me I go “waaaay too fast! And you shouldn’t have those microphones in your ears!” He also shook his cell phone in the air and threatened call the police.

Now, I was by no means gracious to the onslaught, so I had a few choice words myself and felt bad when I discovered he walks his dogs so slowly (and I mean igloo-molasses slow) because of their age (allegedly). But I don’t care. He and his canine companions were perfectly safe, and I feel that three blocks of usually empty sidewalk is not too much to ask.

As I mentioned, I do not own a car and thus ride my bike everywhere (evil Walmart, downtown, etc.). Ninety-eight percent of the time I’m on the street. So, as a bicyclist, I will choose annoying dog walkers over SUVs, and I ain’t apologizing for it!

Oakley C. Merideth
UNM student