Musings since getting back on my bike

So over the past few days I've started getting back into cycling to and from work and what not and there's some things that I've noticed that really get under my skin.  A lot of people that are cyclists ruin it for the rest of us.  I was driving yesterday and saw a cyclist weaving his way through traffic at a set of stoplights.  If you want drivers to treat us as cars, act like one because threading through traffic when they're stopped really annoys them.  I know people don't like this when people on motorbikes do this.  That and it's really just dangerous, if you're one back ya sure pull into the bike lane portion if there is one, otherwise just stick where you are and chances are people will probably respect that. 

The other thing is stop signs, it seems like the entire city of calgary in addition to not knowing how to drive circles do not get the concept of intersections controlled by stop signs.  If you get there first, you go first, having a cyclist come from the other direction does not mean that you should just come to a dead stop and be paralyzed by fear.  If we wave you on to go, chances are we want you to go because we have limited amounts of rolling time left before we have to stop and unclip (or fall over if we've run out of time).  If you don't know what that is, here's a pic

I unfortunately do not posses the balance nor the skill to do such an athletic feat so I usually just wave cars on, and usually they're good, but sometimes they're not.  I don't know if I've actually talked on here about how I had my first real crash (partially a consequence of a dropped chain).  But I came up to a hill and there was a 4 way stop sign with a car going through the intersection.  When the driver saw me coming up (at a very slow speed, I was bagged after the climb) she somehow got the brilliant idea that the next logical course of action would be to stop right in front of me.........I don't know what this would achieve because if she's worried about me running the stop sign and going through it without stopping, stopping the car right in front of me seems counterproductive to the MO.  So when I started again on this hill, probably should've been in a higher gear but torqued pretty hard, dropped the chain and then dropped myself onto the pavement.  So here's a note to all drivers, if we wave you on, we really do want you to go and move, please save being courteous and an overall nice person for when you pass us on the road, we very much appreciate not being clipped by cars (like Sara did). 

But I'll take this time to thank the people that I will never meet, and will probably never get a chance to thank, the ones that move over and give us ample room when they're passing.  I'll probably think of more points later on, and maybe this will become the friday post because it went from a following our training blog to something that I just write about anything and everything really.

~Cheers