Thursday
Mark Green
Hey Gang,
As some of you may know we had an incident with a motorist on Thursday nights ride.
The driver of an SUV tried to pass us on Windy City on a curve over a double yellow line with a car coming from the opposite direction almost causing a head on in the middle of our group. He was quite upset (read raging) and laid on the horn, gave us the finger and then pulled into a side street, got out of his car and tried to engage us. He called the Madison County Sheriff who met us at the end of our ride back at Trinity. The driver admitted that he was wrong and lost his temper, but the Sheriff informed us that they have gotten several complaints and not just on Thursday. I don’t want to get into a long debate about the laws, or who is right or wrong in this instance, but rather what we need to do to keep everyone safe first and foremost. So the complaints coming from drivers are that we are taking the entire lane and with a large group they cannot get around us. The white triangle route would be the biggest problem since it runs a long way down Windy City from the start when traffic is heavy. For now we can simply avoid this route and let things calm down. We will look into alternate routes that will keep us off of Windy City, however everyone needs to know that the Sherriff informed me that if we ride across the entire road they will be writing us tickets for impeding traffic. Basically If we ride a double pace line as we do when you come off of the front and we are now 3 abreast they can write us a ticket. I think we are ok on the county roads if we tighten up or pace lines, don’t hang near the center of the road, and if we move into a single pace line when cars start to back up behind us. If you are near the back of the pace line and see cars behind us pass that information forward. Most people at the front on Thursday didn’t know about the incident until we finished. I want to make it clear that we did nothing wrong, but that we can improve what we do to keep ourselves safer and not agitate motorist because in the end we can be in the right and still lose, our rights and lives so let’s focus on the big picture and be as safe as we can be.
-Mark
Andy Agnew
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jackson Spokes" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jackson-spoke...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to jackson...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jackson-spokes.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.