Home > Uncategorized > Note to the person who backed into my son’s bike and left it with a mangled wheel

Note to the person who backed into my son’s bike and left it with a mangled wheel

July 17, 2010

There are people who actually use bikes for transportation.  Their bikes matter, a lot.  They are as well-made as your car, because they’re purchased for an equally serious purpose.

And for that matter, so do the Wal-Mart bikes you see everywhere, rapidly decaying in place chained to badly-designed bike racks.  It’s not the fault of their owners that a giant discount store chain has cynically crapified what could be an important transportation channel in our overly oil-dependent country, leaving people (including you, apparently) with the impression that bikes are trivial.

Besides, if you damage someone else’s property, regardless of its virtues, you are obligated to make it right.  You stop, leave a note, pay up.

And while we’re at it, the bicyclist is doing a Very Good Thing for the environment you live in.  Of course, we could take a wild guess that you don’t care about that; let your grandchildren find their own way.  They won’t remember that the world was once bright and beautiful and had fish in the sea.  So let’s just leave it at: “They’re making your gasoline cheaper” and “not using up as much road-space as another car”.  All you have to do is pay attention when you drive, which you’re supposed to do anyway.

At the bike shop (where good bikes are found) one of the mechanics told me about a recent case they encountered.  A guy in a Suburban rear-ended a bike at a stop sign.  The wheel was destroyed and he said he’d pay for it.  But when the repair bill was $200 (on an $800 bike), he threw a fit, stormed into the bike shop, demanding everything from explanation to apology.  Why so expensive?!  Didn’t they know he could buy a whole new bike for a hundred bucks!

The shop mechanic pretty much told him; “Great, let’s call the cops then.  You can explain to them how you rear-ended a bicyclist in your 7,000-lb vehicle and don’t want to pay for the repairs.  $200 isn’t a lot of money considering you could have killed the guy.”

Someday people will look back on this age and learn that transportation almost universally meant burning huge amounts of fossil carbon fuels in multi-thousand-pound steel vehicles, and that few people got around by muscle power.  And they’ll marvel at the weirdness of it all.

Categories: Uncategorized
  1. July 18, 2010 at 18:59 | #1

    Hmmm.  Perhaps it’s time for someone to invent some sort of thingy that will cling to a car in case of collision and proceed to make it embarrassingly obvious that the idiot hit a bike and ran off without so much as an “Oops, sorry.”  Something like those wonderful exploding dye packs the banks use.  Inventors, get on it!

    I hope your son’s poor bike recovers!

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