Quote:
Originally Posted by JerryLBell
. Are you asking them to leave to path to allow you by? Usually, these single-lane sections are relatively short and even if a bicycle isn't going all that fast, you're surely not inconvenience by more than a minute or so. Are you in that much of a hurry?
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I'll try to be more clear.
When I first spotted him ahead of me as I was approaching, he was going only around 9mph. At that speed it would've been easy and safe for me to pass him without worrying about being on the wrong side of the path, if oncoming traffic was approaching while I was already on the wrong side of the path.
Instead of allowing me to just get over to that side of the path and pass him - he sped up - t0 12mph. When you're only going 15-18mph in the first place, that 3mph jump in speed for the person in front of you is enough to make it MUCH more risky to try and pass.
He waited until I had already started accellerating (trying to get up to 20mph) and had moved over in preparation to pass him when he sped up.
There was no hill that he was speeding up to try and get over (which is what I and many other cyclists do when I'm getting near an incline). There was no one ahead of him that he might've been trying to catch up to. There was no reason for him to speed up, at that moment, except to prevent me from passing him.
If he had been going 15-18mph I wouldn't have tried. That's a reasonable speed for 20mph multimodal path. But he wasn't even going 10mph when I started trying to pass him. That was WHY I tried to pass him. And he was still going under 15 when he sped up.
When I gave up trying, he slowed down. So I started to speed up again (thinking maybe I could pass him afterall now that he slowed down again) - and he sped up. Except when it was time to go across the entrance to the village off El Camino behind the Savannah Center. He went straight through it without slowing down at the stop sign.
He was irresponsible, and he was trying to instigate - something. I don't know what. All it resulted in was me being annoyed that he was being rude and inconsiderate. Fortunately for him, I'm not some kind of yahoo with a road rage problem.