Drunk cycling.... yep, you can get a ticket for that in Connecticut too.
And it's probably a good thing. Basically it's public drunkenness. Our town has an ordinance prohibiting drinking alcohol "on city streets". I occasionally skirt this law as I walk on the public sidewalk a few feet from my front steps to my driveway... never been ticketed yet.
But I did witness two events, both of which were examples of operating a bicycle while intoxicated, one about 10 years ago and one about 3 months ago. Both ended up with us calling the police and the police helping (not ticketing) the drunk.
During a very busy night in town, our fireworks night (see my pics in the Events page if you want to see how amazing they are over the river), we were all done, home around midnight, and a guy on a bike came flying down the hill by my house, through the intersection, which is a T at the bottom of a hill... he made the left turn and struck the curb across from my house, flew off his bike and landed pretty much in a pile on the sidewalk. Not moving. Face down, more or less. Lucky for him he was already in a drunk stupor when he hit so he didn't feel much. A minute later his friend rides down after him, and we were already out checking out his condition. Didn't look too bad for his 10 foot flying dismount and drunk-sleep-tumble onto the grass and sidewalk. The police, EMT's and ambulance were on the way already. "No policia!" was what his friend kept saying and I thought, this should be fun.
In the end it took about 20 minutes with the EMT's to get him conscious and walking, and his friend took him back ... somewhere... and came back an hour later for the bikes. The man could easily have gotten killed going through that intersection with all the thousands of cars out that night.
This past October we saw a guy coming down the street on his bike, junky old mountain bike, late at night, and approaching us from the side at a 4-way stop. He got about 10 feet from the sign and fell over in the road. I thought he hit something so stayed and watched for a minute. A car was coming behind him. He fell down by the bike, middle of the road, and couldn't get back up. My wife went and checked on him. The other lady driving by stopped and got out to help. (She was a nurse it turned out.) I called the police to let them know the guy was in danger to himself out on the road and they said they would send the EMT's by to check him out. We got him sitting on the sidewalk - he really couldn't do anything else except moan and lie there. No clue how he'd gotten as far as he did on the bike.
The really bad thing for us when driving is that it's easy to be involved in an accident with a cyclist who's not in control. And he's likely to get badly hurt or killed, and even if it's not your fault, that's on your mind forever.
One recent ordinance change in our state is the "Share The Road" law, which pretty much makes it the responsibility of a driver to avoid contact with a pedestrian, cyclist, horse, or agricultural vehicle using the road. The rule is a 3-foot safe passing distance, which seems reasonable till you realize how narrow many of the roads here are. Virtually all our rural roads have no shoulders or breakdown lanes, and too much traffic to be safe. In the city, the parked cars on the sides of the road make a different deadly hazard. Still, awareness of motorists responsibilities around bicycles can only help. See
http://www.sharetheroadct.org for more details.
--Rob
