In Which I Sacrifice For This Safety Message

File from WikiCommons (commons.wikimedia.org) uploaded by Mark Buckawicki who says he doesn't need credit but got it anyway.

NPR used Facebook to share this cute bicycle-related story with some safety advice—true, it is not a great idea to “salmon”—but then made it hard for me to share this great advice on my blog.

If you click “share” on their web site, you get the options to share via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Hey, NPR, what about the blogosphere? It seems like an oddly narrow range of share options. And I always like the sites that have a “get the url” option so if you’re sharing on some site that they didn’t imagine, it’s all good.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure if their own link from Facebook was persistent or ephemeral, so I went back to their own home page and clicked to find the story again with a cleaner URL. You’re welcome.

So now I’m four paragraphs in and I haven’t even reacted to the story. Summary: I’ve never heard of “salmoning,” but I’ve seen it and it’s a bad thing. The “door zone” is a real danger—my only addition as a biker is that you can’t always ride away from parked cars—traffic won’t always allow it—but you do learn to watch said cars for signs of danger. Like a head ahead. And I’ve self-confessed that I’ve done the Idaho stop, although my Daddy, when he taught me to drive back in the 1970s, always cautioned me to avoid a “California stop,” which is when a car does what a biker usually does.

And now after this important safety message and deep runinations, I return you back to your biking life.