don't ever play the "you go, no, you go" game

In many areas of life we find ourselves playing what i call the "you go, No, YOU GO" game. It's when you're grocery shopping and you come down an aisle with a cart and someone else is coming down the same aisle from the opposite direction with their cart and only one of you can fit, so you both wait, in a feeble attempt to be nice, them realize the other person is also waiting, then you both tell the other person to go ahead, then you usually move at the same time. It happens all the time. When walking toward someone and then realizing your path and their path are going to collide in a few more steps, you both stop and step to the side at the same time, then sometimes step back at the same time and sometimes they offer to dance or you'd offer to dance, which in my opinion is the only polite way to verbally acknowledge this situation. Anyway, that's what I call the "you go, No, YOU GO" game. In traffic situations it usually gets more dangerous than in the supermarket, which in a worse case scenario, you may bump a shopping cart, but I'm pretty sure no one would get that hurt from this. I get put in the game by drivers all the time while riding my bicycle. I would say 80% of the time, they are trying to be nice and let the cyclist go ahead first to help out, but more often than not when I'm in this situation, the motorist is fucking up the flow of traffic and then urging me to pull out in front of them. For example if I'm approaching a stop sign and a motorist pulls up to the intersection and they don't have a stop sign (or even a yield sign sometimes!), they will stop and wave for me to go first. This is the most common example of the game. But i have the stop sign and they don't. So i always stop, as this is the intended flow of traffic through the intersection and is how it SHOULD flow. Sometimes I will stop, put a foot down and cross my arms to really hammer down that I AM NOT GOING TO RIDE THROUGH THE INTERSECTION. Which seems to be the ultimate checkmate of a game of "you go, No, YOU GO" so far. I've also had motorists on several occasions make a left turn in front of me while I'm going straight through an intersection with the right of way and then they almost hit me, slam their brakes, stop in the middle of the intersection with cars now approaching from behind me and then urge me to go ahead of them. UH.... not only no, but FUCK NO! This is the worst time to play the game, because the driver is now probably frantic and shaken cause they just tried to haul ass through an intersection to beat the oncoming traffic and then almost hit a cyclist they SOMEHOW didn't see, and they aren't going to be thinking calmly and clearly. Everytime this has happened to me, I have stopped, put my feet on the ground and taken both hands off my handlebars to make sure that the driver understands I AM NOT GOING TO GO! YOU GO! But the moral of the story here is that you should never play the "you go, No, YOU GO" game on a bicycle, EVER!!!!! It's way too dangerous. And if you lose, you may lose big, cause getting hit by a car isn't going to make anybody's day any better.

    Having said all that, this is my theory on 4way stop signs: 4way stop means BIKES GO! I'll explain. I'm not saying that cyclers should blast through stop signs with no regard for the flow of traffic or approaching cars whatsoever. What I'm saying is that when I approach a 4way stop sign and there's a car approaching from one of the other angles, I will typically watch the driver very carefully and not stop at all. This may sound crazy to alot of people, but it alleviates all confusion of who goes first and thus avoids the "you go, No, YOU GO" game. Which I think I've beaten this point to death, but is best avoided at all costs! I would always suggest that you be prepared to stop like your life depends on it, as it very well may if the driver doesn't see you and/or doesn't stop, but look at the driver and ride through the stop sign. 99.999999% of the time, the driver will come to the stop and you'll cruise through just fine. Every once in a while you'll see that the driver is not going to stop and you'll have to slam on your brakes and swerve to the side to avoid catastrophe, but it's pretty rare, at least in residential areas in Norfolk.