I agree. It's not the native portlanders who are the issue. It's all the tricky hipsters and cool cats that want to make Portland weird. I grew up there. In St Johns. A pretty rough area. On the north side I have the Tamaracks and the Columbia Villa. Straight low income housing. Had several friends in there. To the west we had real St Johns. Then it kinda turns north, and the further north you went the tougher it was. I wouldn't change a thing about St Johns. Now I hear it's all trendy little sissies, beta males with their alpha females. Just wrong Wrong WRONG.
I was driving a dump truck with mechanical injection. I carried between 104,000 pounds to 105,500 (and maybe a bit more depending on the route I had to take). The bicycle riders were the biggest pricks out there. They are really a hazard out there like that. I have cure to if not get them back on the sidewalk, to at least move them closer to the curb.
I'd see them pedaling their asses off up the road so I would speed up and catch up to them. The first time I did it, the poor fools had no idea what me a the truck behind me were about to do to them. We get up behind them...maybe 70-75 feet behind them but we kept slowing down. Not a lot at first but by the time we were about 20 feet away from them we stayed in a very high gear. These were 15 speeds so I lots of good gear choices. At the 20 foot away mark I would be in a very tall gear...like 12th or maybe 13th if I thought I could still pull it. Once I had my gear selected and was 20 feet away, I would mash the throttle to the floor!!!! Since the speed was so slow and the gear so very tall the truck would hardly move...you know...about the speed of the average bicycle rider. So mashing the throttle to the floor with mechanical injection with all the load and no road speed to speak off...those old Mack truck and pups would blow smoke out the exhaust pipe like a locomotive.
There was usually two of us running together and sometimes three. And we would all just cover them in warm, smelly diesel fuel ash. It would cover them and just piss them off.
The cyclists learn fast. One or two teaching lessons like that and they pull over when the big trucks come by. Or they get a snoot full of nasty tasting and nasty smelling ash all over their clothes and bikes.
Yep......keep Portland weird.
