Marathon Me

Christopher has been a huge pain in the ass training for his second triathlon. We haven’t done a lot of bike riding since the Kid’s Tri he did in July. Recently, he wasn’t paying attention and almost swerved into a car, and when I yelled at him nicely asked him to watch out it kind of freaked him out.

So we’ve taken a major step back and he now is back to riding as slow as possible while still staying on the bike. It has been quite frustrating. I told him he had to ride Friday, Saturday and Sunday or he couldn’t watch and TV or play any Nintendo DS. So reluctantly he agreed to my terms and we rode Friday night after work. There was some fussing and whining about it, but he finally did do it.

Saturday morning we went back outside thinking there would be less cars to worry about and hopefully we could raise the speed from 5-6 mph to 10 or so. But cars kept zooming down the street. (Christopher now stops his bike totally when a car is coming from either direction. So there was way too many stops/starts.)

Friday night I had spent time talking to a police man patrolling our neighborhood and asked him how I can get him to come monitor near our street. Cars go by at 40-45 mph on our street and then slow down to turn onto theirs. He said he’d see what he could do. Afterwards my neighbor came over and let us borrow his son’s super sweet Hot Wheels Radar Gun, which actually works. So, after finishing up on the bike on Saturday we decided to regulate.

We sent the enforcer out to keep the streets safe. You can see Officer Friendly, above, took his job seriously. It was quite an interesting experiment to see people’s reactions to being zapped.

People who were going slowly looked at us and laughed, those who were speeding would drop from 40 to 20 in 10-15 feet as soon as we zapped them.  It warmed my heart thinking of the panic they got when their radar detectors started going crazy and they couldn’t see a cop.

We kept the streets safe for about 30 minutes, and our rough profiling determined that Soccer Moms are the most likely to speed (we had no sampling of Hockey Moms, with or without lipstick to compare against), teenagers actually drive pretty reasonably, and for the men, it was more a function of the car.  If they had a muscle car, or a sports car they would tend to go faster, if they were in a family sedan they were less likely to run over our children.

So to all the Soccer Moms that drive like a bat out of hell on my street please slow down, driving the speed limit in a neighborhood will only cost you a few seconds and it will make it safer for my kid to play outside.

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Tags: Christopher //