The Cassandra complex

I hate being right all the time.  If you ride city streets for long enough you get a fatal sense of predestination, where you anticipate the worst occuring yet feel helpless to prevent it.  Riding to work in yet another grey, rainy morning of this dreary April, I watched a car blithely rolling into the intersection a few dozen yards in front of me.  I knew he was looking to make a left turn, since he angled the front end of his car in my path and I could only see the back of his head as he peered intently to his right, looking for an opening to fit into.  As I slowed down considerably, I could see a steady stream of cars in the oncoming lane, giving him no quarter; I also knew that the light a couple of blocks behind me had probably changed from red to green by now, loosing traffic that would soon be upon me.  Upon us.

He was halfway into the intersection, blocking my way, but I couldn't swing around him because I knew he might accelerate at any time.  I was trapped.  I knew this would happen.  And I knew there wasn't a goddamned thing I could do about it.

So I slowed to a stop, standing on my pedals about ten feet from him, from his car in my path, from the back of his head which never turned to me.  Until I barked, "WHAT are you DOING, MAN?!"  I must have sounded like I was yelling at him from his back seat, because I saw his face then - finally - as he snapped his head around, showing me his eyes opened wide like a startled cat.  The worst was what happened next, though: he raised his hand from his steering wheel and waved me on, in magnanimity.  I took personal offense and held my trackstand and wagged my head, urging him to complete his turn or get out of my way.  Which he did, after a few more absurd seconds of us screaming at each other in the falling rain, finally reversing his car back behind the crosswalk.  I thanked him loudly in a sarcastic voice two notches above propriety, and rode on my way.

As I made my way to work, I seriously considered becoming one of those militant commuters, who mount a nightclub's worth of strobe lights to their handlebars and sport day-glo safety vests in the daytime, but then I realized that the problem wasn't just that he didn't see me.  No, the problem was that he didn't look for me.  I'm sure he probably looked to see if there were any cars coming towards him when he pulled out into the street, but he didn't look for any cyclists in the road.  He didn't see me coming right at him.  All the flashing lights in the world wouldn't matter if I'm permanently in the driver's blind spot.

So what do we do as cyclists?  How can we make them see the dancing bear?  The short answer is, we can't.  But we can anticipate that they won't see us, and hopefully avoid the worst case scenario even as it looms up before us.  And we can pray that they may someday start to look.