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How to Not Get Hit by Cars
51–60 of 262 posts
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#52Lets get cars out of cities. No car in the city centre no car hitting bicycles and pedestrians. Clean air less noise.
That's neither feasible nor required. Copenhagen still has cars in city centre - personally I drive my bike 95% of the time, but sometimes I need to use my car. However, I much prefer my bike because it's faster, less troublesome, infrastructure is great and the exercise helps. Create incentives for biking, but don't outlaw cars.
I agree with you, I don't think we should ban cars, however making it very difficult to have cars in the city would help! I bike in Copenhagen almost 100% of the time, and its actually so much more difficult to get around by car.
I do think cars should be banned in downtown-downtown though or at least have extremely harsh reinforcement: there is no reason for the rich businessman to be driving his Porsche at 120 km/h down a back road near where everyone cycles.
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#53>#2 The Door Prize: A driver opens his door right in front of you. If you have time to react to a car door suddenly opening in front of you, is it best to go around the door? Or should you brake and stop in a straight line, even if you might crash into the door and the person stepping out of the car? The same site contains a list of cyclist fatalities[0]. In over 95% of the car door collisions, the bicyclist was kill…
> If you have time to react to a car door suddenly opening in front of you, is it best to go around the door?
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you brake, you could run your face through the door window. If you swerve, there better not be a driver behind you.
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#54So much of this advice is “ride to the left” and I wish to emphasize it. Novice riders are trained to stick to an invisible (or painted) bike lake which ends up with them being far less visible than they need to be. Your safety is more important than some car’s need to get to work 5 seconds faster, and you shouldn’t feel controlling anxiety if some idiot honks at you for riding in the main traffic lane. You have righ…
Where I live, the cars greatly outnumber bikes. Cyclists that go in the main traffic lane will slow things down substantially, and I think that is inconsiderate.
I think hitting cyclists with cars and horrifically injuring them is inconsiderate. But each to their own.
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#55https://bicyclesafe.com/#wrongway
I hate this term. The wrong way is simply the safest choice in blind hill situations with ignorant and distracted drivers.
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#56So much of this advice is “ride to the left” and I wish to emphasize it. Novice riders are trained to stick to an invisible (or painted) bike lake which ends up with them being far less visible than they need to be. Your safety is more important than some car’s need to get to work 5 seconds faster, and you shouldn’t feel controlling anxiety if some idiot honks at you for riding in the main traffic lane. You have righ…
It's for these same reasons that I think lane-splitting on a motorcycle is so stupid. They are heavy enough to destabilize cars in a collision, definitely heavy enough to kill bikers, and yet have the same visibility issues as their human-powered cousins
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#57>#2 The Door Prize: A driver opens his door right in front of you. If you have time to react to a car door suddenly opening in front of you, is it best to go around the door? Or should you brake and stop in a straight line, even if you might crash into the door and the person stepping out of the car? The same site contains a list of cyclist fatalities[0]. In over 95% of the car door collisions, the bicyclist was kill…
I think it's similar to car collisions: swerving is tempting because you might prevent the crash, but often taking the crash head on at the lowest speed possible is much safer.
A compounding effect for cyclists is that usually you have a shorter stopping distance in a straight line (since bicycles don't have ABS, so you have to limit breaking while steering)
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#58I've been commuting by bicycle for nearly 40 years, under a broad array of circumstances, and the article's advice checks out with my own personal rules. Although the vast majority of the crashes and wipeouts I've suffered involved no cars, just me losing control. However, over hundreds of wipeouts accumulated over a lifetime of cycling, I have never hit my head! Wiping out is a skill. A skill best cultivated when on…
> hundreds of wipeouts Wait, hundreds ? I don't own a car and use my bike daily, including commuting to work (which means 24 kilometers per day commuting alone), for around 6 years now. As a kid, I cycled to school every day for 9 years. I had maybe 2-3 crashes as a kid, and 2 crashes in the last 6 years: once a garbage man rolled a trash can into my handlebar at full speed, and another time a small branch got caught…
> Wait, hundreds?
Maybe they also mountain bike, or do some other sort of high risk bike sport.
Re: How to Not Get Hit by Cars
#59So much of this advice is “ride to the left” and I wish to emphasize it. Novice riders are trained to stick to an invisible (or painted) bike lake which ends up with them being far less visible than they need to be. Your safety is more important than some car’s need to get to work 5 seconds faster, and you shouldn’t feel controlling anxiety if some idiot honks at you for riding in the main traffic lane. You have righ…
Where I live, the cars greatly outnumber bikes. Cyclists that go in the main traffic lane will slow things down substantially, and I think that is inconsiderate.
You live around a lot of long, straight stretches of road, right?
In my experience, cars take way longer to navigate across intersections, roundabouts, and sharper turns than bicycles, simply because of their size and momentum and limited view.