Police Ticket Sidewalk Bicyclist

Finally, somebody gets a ticket for riding their bicycle on the sidewalk.

It happened this afternoon at around 3:30 when a bunch of Vancouver Police officers were standing in front of the Carnegie Center at Main and Hastings. A guy rode across the crosswalk on his bike and then west on Hastings St. on the sidewalk. A cop approached him, took out his ticket book and wrote down the guy's information. Then he handed him a ticket.

The bylaw probiting bicycling on the sidewalk needs to be enforced more often. Bicyclists are becoming an increasing menace on the sidewalk.

When I told a friend of mine this evening about police issuing the ticket, he told me what he had seen a bicyclist do on Main St. in Chinatown. A guy on a bike, wearing a blue helmet, rode fast toward a crowd of people waiting to board the bus. The people scurried out of the way.

"I saw the same thing! On Main Street in Chinatown!", I told him. "I just wrote about it today [in a draft of this post]. What did the guy look like?" He was middle aged, my friend told me.

The guy I saw didn't look more than 32 years old. It was a few months ago, about 5:30 a.m., and this guy, with his helmet on, was bicycling fast toward a cluster of people boarding a bus. They scattered like pigeons.

On three or four occasions, I have called out to bicyclists on Main St. not to ride on the sidewalk. One guy yelled in my face as he whizzed past me, "Fuck off!" I have resigned myself now to the fact that the bicyclists own the sidewalk. I just move over.

I am thinking along the same lines as a guy who was quoted in the "rant" section of the Westender newspaper advising pedestrians to get into the habit of walking along the curb so that bicyclists can have the sidewalk all to themselves.

It continues to amaze me that bicyclists put on their expensive gear so that they feel safe and confident riding their bikes . . . on the sidewalk. They think they're "green" but they're not; they're yellow cowards.