The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
July 17, 2007
CALL IT CRAZY FROM THE HEAT
You ever notice how the weather affects us?
We're talking specifically about the sudden heat wave we've been experiencing. You know, the dog days of summer we usually long for in the dead of winter when it's already dark and cold by 3:58 PM.
So we cry to whoever will listen about how cold it is, although winter is usually accompanied by serious bouts of below freezing temperatures, frosty windows and often a lot of that white fluffy stuff falling from the sky.
Which makes us wonder why when summer actually does arrive this year it was late suddenly it's far too hot.
Then those who forgot summer is usually accompanied by warm temperatures, faulty air conditioners and nothing in the sky except that very bright star way far away start to cry to whoever will listen about how hot it is.
So it doesn't surprise us at all that every so often someone makes a mistake because of the heat.
Our favourite occurred the other day. While exiting a downtown business onto the sidewalk in front we neglected to look both ways and just about got knocked to the sidewalk by an adult on a bicycle.
No doubt he wasn't on the pavement or he would have gone crazy from the heat or maybe he had already passed that point. So we asked if he was aware that he shouldn't be riding his two-wheeled vehicle on the sidewalk. He gave us one of those dumbfounded 'dunno whatcha mean' looks so we escorted him to the end of the sidewalk and pointed out the bright yellow stenciled sign on the sidewalk that announced 'NO BIKES' which had obviously be repainted in the past day or two.
He told us he had never seen it before.
Well, that could be possible, suffering from the heat and all.
It just so happened the next day we noted more and more bike traffic had moved off of the pavement and on to the sidewalk.
It was almost like one of them trends you hear about. Some sort of adverse reaction to the heat bouncing up off the pavement and causing a meltdown of some kind that can only be avoided by riding on the sidewalk where the higher the temperature, the more of those silly little 'NO BIKES' warnings get cancelled out.
It made us wonder what the point really was of the yellow spray-painted stencil signs.
In their defense, the average bicyclist is probably taking their life in their hands riding on the pavement with all those heat crazy drivers out there.
Then we pulled out a calculator and did some figuring.
We determined the odds are in your favour if you ride your bike on downtown sidewalks rather than on the downtown streets. Not only is it safer than getting hit by a car or truck or meteor or lightning strike or flying cigarette butt or another cyclist, but also you have a better chance of surviving a crash with an innocent pedestrian (or scooter) on any downtown sidewalk.
And we wondered how long it would be before those heat crazy drivers started to travel on the sidewalks making room on the pavement for the cyclists and how many cyclists it takes to see a bright yellow sign and if we ate the batteries in our calculator would it make us any faster at solving these riddles and if a pedestrian falls on the sidewalk, does anyone hear it?
Then we threw the calculator out the door narrowly missing a cyclist on the sidewalk.
