Ice Ice Baby

This morning I went outside to a car covered in frost. Good thing I'm not driving. Plenty of other people were though, and a lot of them had scraped little, tiny holes in their windshield ice to peer out to barely see the road. Good thing they didn't hit me. I was dressed well for the cold, and in fact was a little warm in my four layers of wool. Just for fun I weighed my clothing and not including shoes and helmet had five pounds of clothing. Good thing I'm not a weight weenie.
You can't tell from the title, but this is probably going to be a bike blog. I'll be writing about Peak Oil routinely. But today I'm going to complain about Seattle drivers and bicyclists.
Both exist in a really weird world where obeying traffic rules can get you hurt. Seattle drivers are too slow, too polite, maybe too afraid of hurting someone else's feelings. Or probably passive aggressive. You just never know when a car is going to stop to yield. Cyclists in this environment have their way with traffic.
You may say, hey Len, you're a cyclist too, why are you putting us down? Because you're going to get *me* killed. I live about ten miles from work by the route I like best. A portion of my ride includes the Burke Gilman Trail where it passes through the University of Washington. There are many places where the trail crosses the roads, where the trail is posted to yield or to stop. Many cyclists view that as a suggestion, relying on the polite drivers to stop for them. I was hit this summer by a fellow cyclist when I stopped at a crossing, as the red octagon demanded. The fellow who hit me apologized and asked why I stopped. Well, I responded, I didn't want to be hit by the bus. He replied that he was sure the bus would have stopped. Sure, with me under it.
I complain because I see your bad habits could infect me. Not wanting to be hit from behind, or not going with the flow of traffic, I could change my ways and too be an outlaw. A dead outlaw. I think not.