sometimes you're the windshield
I saw a woman on a bike get into an accident with car while I was running this morning. She saw it coming and was able to slow down and brace herself for it, so the end result was that she bent her front wheel and hurt her wrist as she collided with the rear passenger door. The bicyclist had the right of way in the weird intersection, and the most striking thing to me about the whole incident (once I realized that there weren't serious injuries) was that she was already cursing the driver before the impact. The driver was horrified and teary during the exchange of insurance information, which seemed to slightly mollify the cyclist, but she was still fuming when I left.
During the mile that was left of my run, I thought about the people I know that ride their bikes on the city streets and I realized that almost all of them would have had the same sort of angry reaction. Pittsburgh tries to be a bike friendly city with lots of trails and some bike lanes on streets, but bikers will always get the worst end of the deal in any accident. The thing I was thinking about was the line where needing to ride defensively, pay attention, and assert their right to be there turns into being belligerent. I'm generalizing to say that most bikers I've encountered have a healthy dose of that along with their self-protectiveness.
I only ride my bike on trails where I don't have to contend with cars. I'm also someone who struggles with being assertive enough. I started to wonder - are people who ride their bikes on streets naturally further along on the assertiveness scale or does riding their bikes on the streets help make them that way?
mantaraggio , are you going to ride your butchy bike in the streets?
ETA: Thank you all for contributing your thoughts and for being so careful to articulate and clarify in what can be a sticky medium. I appreciate hearing what you all think and I'm glad I raised the question.
Funnily enough, on my way to work today, I saw a car driving in the bike lane beside me. When I looked over at the driver, I could see that she was a woman old enough to be doing that mouth gumming thing and squinting over the steering wheel. The kicker was that her car was all scratched and dinged all along the side and rear end, so it was clear she (at least her car) was no stranger to all kinds of vehicular incidents. I was really thankful there weren't any bikers around.