Assuming the traffic light at Redwood and Skyline has a camera, I would love to get a copy of any shots it took around 3:30 pm today.
About twenty minutes into today’s bike ride, I was cruising downhill on Skyline towards the intersection with Redwood. I slowed down to around 30 mph so that the light would turn green before I hit the intersection. After the light changed, a red BMW in the left turn lane going the opposite direction on Skyline started creeping forward and turning into my path. As I entered the intersection, the car had almost closed off the left lane and was still moving across, albeit slowly.
While I think she saw me and was just trying to sneak through between me and the car that was a few hundred feet behind me, she had on sunglasses and I couldn’t tell if she was ever going to stop. If she had kept going at the same speed, she would at the very least have clipped me with her front bumper.
To the likely astonishment of the drivers of the other cars and to the couple of kids walking home from Skyline High (and somewhat to my own astonishment), I grabbed my brakes quickly and rode a stoppie through a significant part of the intersection. A stoppie is a move where you apply your front brake hard enough to lift the rear wheel into the air and continue riding on just your front tire. Here’s some info on doing a stoppie with a dirt bike.
While I’ve ridden a stoppie before, this time it definitely wasn’t intentional. Since I’m still rehabbing and building up strength in my right shoulder, I can’t grip things with my right hand very tightly. Normally I apply the front brake with a couple times the force of the rear brake, but I had so little time to react that I couldn’t compensate. I was trying not to end up as a new BMW hood ornament, so I ended up applying much more force to the front brake than I could apply to the rear brake. Even still, I didn’t pitch over the handlebars, though it certainly felt like my center of gravity was pretty far forward above the bars.