Was talking to my handyguy about a particular house. The guy keeps the yard mowed, but the house is vacant and has been steadily falling into disrepair. There had been some effort to repair the roof with sheets of metal, but a wind storm had torn them off of his house and blown them into my yard. I was dragging them back into the guy’s yard for him to find.
It seems that the guy and his wife allowed their 7yo to ride his bike on the road near the lake. A nice, remote, country road. And while he was riding his bike in the road, someone didn’t see him, and hit him, and he died, and the family fell apart, and they abandoned the house they had been living in, but they couldn’t bring themselves to sell it, and that was the house.
Riding a bike on a country road is legal. But he wasn’t very visible, and he died.
I listen to the local police scanner. Occasionally, they’ll call in EMS or LifeFlight for four-wheelers that have flipped. They’re riding on their own property— but they still lose control. I look outside my window, and I occasionally see people driving go karts down the street… but they blast right through the stop signs, and don’t follow the usual rules of the road.
Some towns allow slow-moving vehicles (ie, golf carts) to travel on their city streets. Mine does, but they have to display the slow-moving vehicle sign. And that’s okay.
Not everything that’s legal is safe. Not everything that’s safe is legal. But it’s a bad thing to start getting into the mindset of “this rule doesn’t apply to me because it gets in the way of doing what I want to do.” (I’m looking at you, drunk drivers…)
