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Things people blamed on bicycles

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Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#111

Post by schoen »

mrweasel wrote: post #90
schoen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a bike safety class that was supposedly taught by professionals and supposedly based on local vehicle legislation (in California) and they taught us to make vehicular left turns, by positioning ourselves in the rightmost traffic lane which is allowed to turn left, and indicating our intentions to make a left turn with our hands. I've subsequently done this several hundred times in various kinds of traffic. Did…

> Did they make a mistake? For California, I don't know. For western European: Oh my god YES! By all mean signal which way you're going to turn, but in intersection, especially those with multiple lanes, you never make a left turn. Drivers will not expect you in the middle of the intersection.

I'm genuinely grateful to learn that, and I'll try to avoid making vehicular left turns in intersections in Europe in the future!

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#112

Post by bipson »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #64
vocram wrote: post #15

Hate for bicycles hasn’t changed. People think a bike travel is recreational, and thus less important than a car travel. Someone goes out of their way to affirm that, by having to overtake bikes or not let them overtake their cars. A couple of times I met cars busting their brakes trying to keep up with me with a disc road bike on long technical descents

I've never found bicycles to be a massive issue on roads. They're slow and narrow, so they're easy to overtake. Where I am there's often tractors on the road. A lot harder to overtake, and I still manage to refrain from getting angry at them either! People need to just chill the fuck out.

A lot of people, those around me included, seem to not grasp that for safe overtake of a bicycle you still require a second lane (at least partially) besides your own.

But in traffic and the laws lane usage is binary. There is no such thing as half lanes, you cannot use the second lane "a little". You either need it, or you don't.

So overtaking a bicycle, a motorbike, a pedestrian on the road or a tractor, etc. it is all the same.

What I'm trying to say is, where I live people forget that all the time, and then they think they can "squeeze by", endangering cyclists, motorcyclists and most of all the opposing traffic. I see this multiple times a week in the summer.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#114

Post by montebicyclelo »

Cycling is cheap, often faster than driving (in my city), healthy, less noisy, creates vastly less pollution, less dangerous to pedastrians...

And I'd guess that about 95% of drivers that I come across are respectful of the danger they present - overtaking with enough space, and not at too high a speed (my city doesn't have great bike lanes). Unfortunately, a typical journey involves passing more than 20 cars, which means experiencing at least 1 very close pass, or some kind of dangerous driving.

And the frustrating thing is that the drivers who impatiently pass dangerously are putting people at risk for the sake of ~10-30 seconds (or less). Often I'll catch up with them at the queue for the traffic lights.. Average traffic speeds for cars are around 8-12mph, including stopping for lights, congestion, etc, [1] which is fairly easy to surpass on a bike..

[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2019/19767

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#115

Post by nopehnnope »

mattashii wrote: post #83
nopehnnope wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need it explained to you how a bike is more dangerous to pedestrians than a runner? A bike has way more inertia, is harder to stop than someone running, and is a tangle of metal that can seriously injure someone, and more difficult to safely maneuver around short of standing the side and stopping to let them pass. Takes half a second of thought to realize all this but you chose to play incredulous inste…

> Do you really need it explained to you how a bike is more dangerous to pedestrians than a runner? No, I do understand that there is (some) more danger to a bike. But a bike also provides an elevated viewpoint to the cyclist, allowing for a better overview of the traffic situation, allowing the cyclist to better participate in traffic. > more difficult to safely maneuver around short of standing the side and stoppin…

No post body was provided.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#116

Post by schoen »

rob74 wrote: post #104
mrweasel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the picture in the Wikipedia article, like NYC bikes lanes, that lane has been placed by an idiot. It's on the wrong side of the car. Still, in places with no bike lanes, I sort of see your point, but who in their right mind opens a door straight into traffic. If it's a bike it's going to unpleasant for the rider, if it's a car, your car door comes off. I think it's less of a problem here in Denmark, partly d…

> that lane has been placed by an idiot. It's on the wrong side of the car. No, it's on the right (i.e. correct) side of the car - drivers are trained to look into the side mirror before opening the door, passengers not (and even if they were, they can't use the mirror on their side).

There are now some protected bike lanes in which parked cars provide part of the protection (!), but you need a lot of space in order to construct one without having the passenger-side door zone overlapping the protected lane.

It's pretty nice as a cyclist, in the minority of cases where there was enough space to do it this way. I suspect it may have required eliminating an entire traffic lane in some places!

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#117

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

taneq wrote: post #92
fzfaa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When driving, cyclists are dangerous for themselves and for others. When walking, cyclists have absolutely no regard for my physical safety. When I lived in a city with a lot of cyclists I ended up developing some kind of fear that made me look around all the time because of how many cyclists had almost killed me when I was peacefully walking along the pavement. Oh god how I hate cyclists.

I've always found it ironic that there's a certain breed of cyclist who regards car drivers the way pedestrians regard cyclists, while regarding pedestrians the way car drivers regard cyclists, and while simultaneously perpetrating every insult that any of the above imposes on any other. (Obviously there are many courteous cyclists too, just as there are many courteous drivers and pedestrians, I'm just talking about…

Rather than trying to divide people into categories based on how they happen to be travelling (many cyclists are also drivers and pedestrians at times), I find it better to appreciate that a percentage of the population act like assholes (5%?). The thing is that assholes in motor vehicles are likely to injure/kill someone, whereas assholes on bikes are as likely to injure themselves as others and assholes on foot are very unlikely to injure others (excepting the ones that step out into a road/cycle path without looking). So, what we need to do is attempt to get as many assholes out of their cars and onto bikes (or foot) for as many journeys as possible. I welcome seeing an asshole on a bike as it means they're not currently an asshole in 2 tonnes of speeding death machine.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#118

Post by raisin_churn »

mellonaut wrote: post #19

This is hilarious. I remember a similar collection of headlines and opinion pieces calling out ‘newspapers on trains causing people not to talk to each other’, where ‘newspapers’ could be easily substituted for ‘smartphones’ to bring the title in the current era. I wonder which piece of technology is currently cautioned as the root of all evil, bringing a laugh to future historians. ‘Video Games’ (causing violence an…

It's still the bicycle. In my city in just the last year, I've seen bicycling accused of causing gentrification (along with Little Free Libraries), traffic, juvenile delinquency, gun violence, falling tax revenues, poor road maintenance, property tax increases, and undoubtedly some more that I've forgotten.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#119

Post by vanderZwan »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #25

HN (and twitter) wants to find people that hate cyclists so we can get angry at them, but I don't think that's what's really happening here. For example: > "We may recall the sage observations made by a writer in one of the English medical journals two or three years ago, that the habit of smoking and the prevalence of appendicitis had both increased during the last two decades, and consequently it was reasonable to…

> HN (and twitter) wants to find people that hate cyclists so we can get angry at them

Have you like… ever been on a bike in a country where cycling isn't normalized? There's no need to look for these people, they'll find you

> Seems very clear that this article in particular is satire. Its actual underlying point is that a connection between smoking and health problems is as ridiculous as a connection between cycling and health problems.

It also seems very clear to me that most of the stuff the British tabloids make more sense when read as bad satire (because they tend to punch down, and punching down is bullying, not satire) than articles intended to be taken at face value, but they genuinely want the public to do the latter.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#120

Post by eptcyka »

wodenokoto wrote: post #82
eptcyka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How am I supposed to make a left turn at an intersection? Other than that, yes, being on the far right on the road is where I'd feel safest.

You are not supposed to take a left turn at an intersection on a bicycle! That’s insane. Do you expect pedestrians to do the same? You go straight and stop at the end of the intersection. Wait for lights to change and cross again. I would honk if someone took a left turn in front of my car on their bicycle in Copenhagen.

Honk away, then. Whenever I make left turns on intersections, I pre-emptively check behind me if there's any traffic coming behind me, use hand signals to signal my intent to move left and then confidently take the lane I need, so long as there isn't any fast moving traffic coming my way. I would stop if it's impossible to cross lanes without impeding traffic.
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