[Carfreeliving] Recruiting Volunteers for Traffic Calming

[Bert Hill]

Picked this up on an internet search of another subject:

attributed to Zack Kaplan.

One of my favourite riding situations is when I'm taking the lane for
obvious safety reasons and a motorist pulls right up behind me and starts
blowing their horn. I like this because the blowing of their horn indicates
they see me. The blowing of the horn also signals they have made an informal
agreement with me to help me create a rolling traffic calming device and
guard my rear from faster moving vehicles coming up from behind that might
not be able to slow down on time. We can thus travel for several blocks with
the motorist giving me full rear impact protection. At some point the
motorist becomes tired of acting like a rolling road block and rear buffer
zone for me so they then move to the left and accelerate, generally giving
one more long honk to signal to me they are done playing rolling traffic
calming device. Often they will yell out the window while they pass. I'm
never quite sure what they say but I assume it could loosely be paraphrased
to "It was an honour to follow you, beautiful cyclist! I wish I weren't so
fat and could ride like you".