It's "Live and Let Live" for Lamorinda's Bikers - Mostly

If you live in Lamorinda, you've no doubt seen clusters of spandex-clad bikers or lone pedalers chugging along our roads, jacked-up trucks and SUVs whizzing past within inches. With all that steel barreling along the same twist-turning asphalt, bikers must have a hundred stories of near-misses and collisions. Right?

Well, yes and no. Ask a bike enthusiast about drivers, or vice versa, and you'll hear five minutes of fair talk and plenty of "I've never had a problem here." Dig a little deeper, though, and the story thickens.

"Every once in a while someone will throw something at you, like a water bottle," Jeff Sigman says 10 minutes into a phone interview.  He's biked in Lamorinda for the past six years, and has ridden in Marin and in the Midwest, before moving to California. "In Marin, I've actually had people yelling obscenities at me," he remarks. Sigman says the drivers' attitudes here are best, then admits, "Most of the incidents I've had here have been teenagers acting out."

Berit Gamsky has developed a technique for biking safely. "I make a presence on the road," she says. "I have eye contact — I ride defensively." She say she feels confident on most area roads, but worried about her kids when they were young.  "I knew they could be distracted," she explains, lifting some of the responsibility from the drivers.

Last year, Gamsky lost a friend in a tragic accident in Danville, and road risk is never far from her mind. Several high-profile fatalities have shaken Contra Costa's biking community - including one over the weekend in Tilden Regional Park. Gamsky says she's conscious of the time and location of her rides; avoiding Moraga Road coming up from Lafayette, except on early Sunday mornings. About riding in a group, she says, "The main thing is that we're riding.  We're not talking and doing other things." Drivers doing other things while driving — texting, or speeding — is her strongest complaint.

Navid Boozarpour, 11, is also out there, riding often and under his own set of rules.  "I try to stick in the bike lanes," he says, "because you don't want to cause a commotion." He is well-drilled in ways of the road; his only driver complaint is overdone courtesy: "They think I'm a kid, so they stop when they want to turn.  But I know they have the right of way, so they don't have to stop."

Drivers in Lamorinda have largely made peace with bikers for one good reason: Many of them are bikers too.  "As a driver I have seen some riders, or groups, behave as if they own the road, which does nothing to endear them to someone in a car," writes Bill Cone in an email. Cone has logged in the miles as a biker, and summarizes his experiences by saying there's "a happy medium for cars and bikes sharing the road, and that's the way it has (mostly) worked for me."

Jeff Schaffer, another biker/driver, sees both sides. He describes coming around a blind curve in the Canyon and finding himself nose-to-vehicle with a driver passing other bicyclists. "There's no passing there," he points out, "but they do it anyway." Quick-flipping to the other perspective, he notes that the beauty of Lamorinda attracts riders from all over the East Bay, and he knows what others know: "Drivers can get sick and tired because they see so many bikers."

An intriguing factor of the biker-driver plot, are road conditions. Potholes and debris in the bike lanes put both at risk, sometimes forcing them to "share" a lane.  And some monster truck drivers deliberately drive off the edge of area roads, according to Schaffer and Sigman.  While the kick of stirring up a dirt and rock cloud is fun for a 4-wheeler, it destabilizes the surface for bikers.  "Sometimes part of the road will fall right off the hill," says Schaffer.  On narrow roads like Canyon or Pinehurst, those missing inches could be the difference between a pleasant Sunday outing and a disaster.

 In the end, our riders told Lamorinda Patch, it's rider be aware. With great access to sweeping vistas and miles of bike trails to cruise, slip on your spandex and a helmet, but remember Gamsky's words and "ride defensively."