Videos show bus love, bike hate

Triangle Transit, in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, has a clever set of videos to publicize their bus service and its advantages:

The series of videos emulate the campy style of the classic soap operate, but to tell you that it’s easy to pay the bus fare, they have real-time arrival information on smartphones (above), or that Triangle Transit buses can use the shoulder to bypass traffic on highways.

On a less smile-inducing video note, one Alabama man has gone around videotaping his drives, in which he shouts epithets at cyclists along the road (who are doing nothing wrong).

As Michael Keith Maddox passes a cyclist, he says he “ought to run him in a ditch,” and he’s “going to hurt one of them one of these days.” In one of the clips in this mash-up he shouts, “Ride your bicycle, you piece of crap,” and in another, he revs his engine as he passes while cackling, “That scare you, boys?”

Based on the videos, the county sheriff arrested Maddox, who also apologized on Facebook. But every day some people come across a bicyclist on the road who is doing nothing except trying to get from one place to another, yet have a similar, if more subtle, reaction.