Mischief with Bicycles

I went for a cycle today, as I often do when the weather is fine and the bicycles are free (which is to say, all of the time :)).

On my way home, I decided to park my bike at the Bicing station nearest my house, on Av. Meridiana. When approaching from Les Glories, this involves making a questionable manoeuvre of crossing some tram tracks and a pedestrian crossing, then cycling about 10 metres against the flow of traffic to the station. There's generally enough clearance to do it comfortably, and there is rarely heavy traffic when I'm out and about, so it's by no means a dangerous manoeuvre.

The bicing station has an area marked out in front for cyclists to stand when retrieving or returning a bicycle. Today as I approached there was a car parked in that space. Inside was a suit talking on his businessman phone and making notes in a pad. He had obviously pulled in off the road and, rather than park in an actual car space, or turn the corner 5 metres in front of him onto a side street, he had decided to be an ignorant bastard and park across about 8 bike slots.

This annoyed me as it meant that I had to cycle out onto the main road and into oncoming traffic to get around him, because all the bike slots in front of his car were full already. So my normally safe, but questionable, manoeuvre became questionable and slightly dangerous today just because some suit wanted to park his car in a bicycle parking space. That attitude among motorists that cyclists aren't legitimate road users really bothers me.

As a result, I decided it would be a good idea to leave my bike as close as possible to his car. He had pulled his car up to within inches of a bike on the front of his car, and so I placed mine a similar distance from the back of his car. Because the bikes are parked perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis of his car, this meant that there was no way he could possibly remove his car. He would have had to either run over one of the bikes (a difficult thing to do without damaging his car as they are slotted into a rail at the front) or wait until a cyclist shows up to free him.

For all I know, he's still there.

Serves the fucker right.