For Parts I and II of my Bicycling Survival Guide, the focus has been on the etiquette of cycling on trails and roads, with emphasis on behavior that may help us reverse the negative perceptions motorists/noncyclists have of us.

Yet, the reality of riding on the road is that it’s inherently dangerous. Even if a cyclists does absolutely everything correctly and 100 percent by the book – obeys every traffic law, signals every turn, yields every right of way, builds goodwill out the ying yang – he/she can still end up in a hospital, or worse.

That’s the scary part of cycling. You can be 100 percent perfect and in the right, but end up dead, or seriously injured by a distracted motorist.

We’ve seen some chilling examples in the last six weeks in St. Louis – hit-and-run motorists, broken collarbones, concussions, a broken pelvis, lacerations. It’s sobering to realize that every time I roll out of my driveway, I’m vulnerable.

Yet, I … we … take the risk for many reasons — transportation, fitness, or just the joy of riding a bicycle. Some folks would suggest we have no business riding in traffic, that we should have our heads examined for doing something so crazy. But is riding a bicycle on the road any more crazy than dumping $30 of fuel into your tank, bankrolling Middle East oil interests and polluting the atmosphere?

Didn’t think so … and in reality, that makes most cyclists doubly crazy. We ride in traffic and we drive cars. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of avid cyclists own cars, and actually use them, a lot. To ridicule noncyclists for abuse of fossil fuels is hypocritical at worst and disingenuous at best, unless you’re among the few purists who use bicycles as their only means of transportation. Then you have the right to be sanctimonious and indignant.

For the rest of us, before we start yammering about our “rights” as cyclists, we have to examine our own conscience and clean up our own act by behaving on the trails and behaving on the roads. We do ourselves, individually and collectively, no favors when we flout the rules of the road and the rules of civility, regardless of how some motorists mistreat us.

By educating and policing ourselves, we position ourselves with the righteous authority to speak out and act against the stark reality we face each time we hit the road – that for each one of us, this ride might be our last.

Scary to admit that, but it’s the reality we desperately need to address. And now that we’ve spent three posts yammering about what we should be doing, we’ve established the moral high road to educate our four-wheeled, fossil-fuel guzzling brethren, tomorrow in Part IV.

–30–