CUL-DE-SAC

I haven’t been stopped by the police very often when riding my bike. But it happens. And it happened again toward the end of a 30-mile ride I took yesterday through National City, Chula Vista, Barrio Logan and Balboa Park.

I was headed home after dark on Meade Ave, a wide road with a lot of stop signs. They claim I was blowing through the stop signs, and of course I was. Coming to a complete stop on a bike kills your momentum and makes you stand on your pedals to get going again. Doing that over and over at each stop sign slows you way down. I typically reduce my speed a bit, look both ways and keep going if there’s nobody else in the intersection.

Of course, I didn’t say this to the cops. They wouldn’t have been interested or sympathetic. Arguing with police when it’s nothing more than a traffic violation is just a bad idea. You never win those arguments.

One of them took my license, took it back to the squad car and ran it through the computer. Turned out I wasn’t wanted for anything.

In fact, they were three nice young men and we had a nice conversation. I told them riding a bike in San Diego was dangerous. I told them about getting hit by a car at Colewood and Montezuma that gave me TBI and put me in a recovery program for 3 months.

I told them about the 30-mile ride I was doing that day and they seemed impressed.

When they let me go, without a ticket, I made sure to stop at all stop signs with my remaining couple of miles to go. I wasn’t sure the headlights behind me were police, but they could have been. It was too dark to tell.

This entry was posted on December 28, 2019 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.