Okay, I'm all in favor of cyclists. Those equipped with brains or an instinct for self-preservation or both, that is. The advantages of using a bicycle for transportation rather than a CO₂-belching automobile are legion.

Portland, Oregon, 175 miles south of Seattle, where I live, has a city sponsored program involving placing bicycle racks all over the city in which there are a number of bicycles, painted yellow. The idea is that a person can take one of these bicycles, pedal to their destination, and leave the bicycle in the nearest bike rack for someone else to use. It makes it easy for many people to get around the city without having to use a gasoline-consuming, air polluting automobile. The program, as I understand it, is quite popular, and there are mutterings here in Seattle of instituting a similar program. The only problem here is that Seattle is considerably more hilly that Portland is, but it should work well here in certain areas of the city.

One BIG problem, however:   a distressingly large number of times, I have sat at the wheel of my automobile (Toyota Corolla) at a stop light, then, when the light turned green and I started moving across the intersection before the driver behind me hits his horn, some Kamikaze on a bicycle, hell-bent on suicide, would shoot across my bow and I'd have to romp on the binders to keep from creaming him - and risk getting tail-gated.

Usually it's guys - apparently with more testosterone than brains. Women tend to be more intelligent in this regard.

The way Seattle's traffic lights are set up, when a light changes, it shifts from green to amber and sits there for several seconds before it goes to red, so the cyclist has plenty of warning. But it's mind-boggling the number of times a cyclist will shoot a red light, right in front of a bunch of cars that are accelerating into the intersection.

Darwin in action? Nature's way of weeding the stoopud ones out of the gene pool?

Don Firth

P. S. Perhaps the most unreliable component of a bicycle is the nut that holds the handlebars?