Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 30)  Defensive driving and the soft target
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Around this time I amassed 16 traffic tickets on a bike. I don’t remember the exact order of things but the police targeted my bike riding for running red lights etc. Good god my entire life as a free man seems amazingly distorted simply because I was strange, didn’t drive a car, and was bold enough to demand equal protection on the road.

At first they pecked away with single tickets for this or that. One guy arrested me for failure-to-appear after I refused to yield my lane to him as he tried to pass my bike on a narrow single-lane no-passing zone. He stopped me, and discovered my legal shortfall, so I went to jail. The next day I got out on $100 bail.

When I appeared in court, the judge gave me a fine plus ‘defensive driving’ … but the defensive class was scheduled to meet four times in a town 20 miles to the north. LOL, twenty miles north and I had no vehicle. That was a good one.

But look at what happened. The court put the sentence 20 miles away to point out a deficiency in somebody for refusing to conform to car-world.

I dutifully rode my bike 20 miles north and back, over the hills, on a dark highway for all four night classes. It was an easy ride and didn’t stress me but I wasn’t a highway rider so thought it would take a longer. The first time I went, the police cars followed me out for about six miles, and then the state police checked on me during the return trip in the drizzling rain. I appreciated that gesture and knew my lawyer was behind it.

Defensive driving: now get out your notepad and pay attention to the government advice. At one point, the instructor told everybody to avoid trees and poles if they lost control on the road. Why? Because drivers instinctively try to stop fast by running into hard objects.

He told his errant young charges they should pick ‘soft areas’ to crash their car, so I raised my hand and asked the instructor if ‘soft areas included pedestrians.’ He stared at me in shock, but I wanted the language to get back to the courthouse since I definitely felt like one of those so-called ‘soft areas’ whenever I rode a bike.

Chapter 31-32) I was done playing
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