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Things people blamed on bicycles

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Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#441

Post by MrFantastic »

antihero wrote: post #310
DoubleFree wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of dangerous interactions between drivers and cyclists is much smaller here in the Netherlands, mainly due to two reasons. The first reason is the infrastructure, both visible and invisible. Separated bicycle lanes are commonplace and in the few places where they intersect with car traffic, care is taken to make crossing safe and comfortable. This visible infrastructure is complemented by the concept of "…

Just need a way to deal with bike theft. My number one concern is parking my pretty decent bike within view of where I’m sitting or not leaving it unattended for over five minutes. I’m insured, but I have a bond with my wheels! If anyone has recommendations for stealth theft detection/tracking devices I’m all ears.

Cover the branding labels on your bike. The thieves want to steal expensive bikes, not a walmart bike.

I used white engineering reflective tape. They'd have to be very dedicated thief to notice to the Deore XT components.

Plus, the reflective tape is very visible at night.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#442

Post by pessimizer »

Oras wrote: post #29

Nothing changed over the years, bicycles here is just a variable. {something} is the reason of {insert a problem}. I wonder if there is a template for these titles. * You might want to search YouTube for "Daily mail cancer song" by Russell Howards.

Describing potential causation isn't a cliché, it's one of the most basic motives for communication.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#443

Post by NanoCoaster »

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 don't know what parts of western Europe you're talking about, but in Germany, cyclists absolutely make left turns all the time. Also, drivers are taught about this in driving school, so they will (or should at least) expect cyclists to be there.

For the record, I personally prefer crossing twice as well. But I'll disagree with "western Europe".

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#444

Post by [deleted] »

slingnow wrote: post #372
seszett wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... I'm both a pedestrian and biker (and I generally use a car when outside my city) and honestly, I find it normal for pedestrians to give priority to bikes. It's just a lot more energy expensive to stop and start again for a bike, while it is essentially free for a pedestrian. As a pedestrian I always try to avoid making bikes stop unnecessarily, and most people seem to do the same here, even if pedestrians tec…

Well if energy output is your reasoning: then it's orders of magnitude more energy for a car to come to a full stop and re-accelerate than it is for a pedestrian to let it pass. Should cars then have priority over people in a crosswalk?

[deleted]

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#445

Post by wongarsu »

rimliu wrote: post #295
laputan_machine wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just like that, you've proven his point. This guy doesn't run reds, I don't either. Apparently that's irrelevant because some cyclists do (and here's a bunch of anecdotes) so it's not a problem to harrass cyclists. Right on!

I see a car passing red light maybe twice in a year. I see a cyclist doing the same twice a week.

I see cars driving 50km/h in a 30km/h area multiple times a day.

Everyone breaks the traffic laws, it's just that for cars it's about speed (speed limits, illegal overtaking etc) while for cyclists it's about momentum (running red lights, stop signs etc). Both are dangerous behaviors that put others at risk

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#446

Post by baby »

ChrisRR wrote: post #52
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

In the UK as a cyclist I still get so much hate on the road. I'm just trying to get to work like everyone else, but people still drive their cars up right behind me, squeeze past when there's not enough space, beep their horns and shout out the window. And then the justification is always "well I saw a cyclist run a red light once, therefore all cyclists are shit"

I tried biking in London for a while and I will never try that again. Everybody hated me and wanted to kill me. Cars and pedestrians alike.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#447

Post by kuschku »

LtWorf wrote: post #418
kuschku wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where they’d get an electric bicycle going 50, considering it’s impossible to buy or import ones going more than 20 km/h in most of the EU.

You download a chinese firmware and flash it of course…

Then your problem isn’t with cyclists, your problem is with jackasses running illegally tuned motorcycles (because that’s what a two-wheeled vehicle that can accelerate beyond 45 km/h is) on bike lanes.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#448

Post by dionidium »

slingnow wrote: post #378
goethes_kind wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the issue. As you can see from my previous comment I agree with you, that cyclists are a danger from a pedestrians perspective. The problem from a cyclist's point of view is that having to stop every block to let pedestrians cross, would really really really suck on a bicycle; just losing all momentum and having to start from a stop. It would also probably be bad for the knees after a while.

It also really sucks to have to constantly stop in a car for all of those annoying traffic lights, stop signs, and of course crosswalks. It would be much much much easier and faster to just continue driving without stopping to my destination. It would also probably be bad for the environment with all of that extra idle time waiting and acceleration. The argument sounds ridiculous when framed from a drivers point of v…

> Either you want traffic laws to be obeyed or you don't.

In fact, no, it isn't binary. Driving laws are written in blood. When a driver speeds or runs a red light they massively increase the chance of severe injury, death, or catastrophic property damage, for both themselves and everybody around them.

This is just simply not the case for all other modes of travel. So, no, I don't want the laws to be either "enforced or not." I care way more about enforcing laws on the drivers of multi-ton machines traveling at high rates of speed than I do the guy on a bicycle or the pedestrian.

This frustrates drivers, who demand that everybody be treated the same. But it's absurd to treat all modes of travel the same, which is why a ground crew isn't required for you to back out of your driveway, even though it is for commercial jets.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#449

Post by gray_-_wolf »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #440
gray_-_wolf wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> charging something something But charging is (well, would be, I don't have EV) annoying. I usually fill the gas tank once a month or two and it takes 15 minutes including the trip to gas station. The ~500km distance I get from full tank is enough to cover my car use for a long time. So yeah, having to charge more often, having to find a place to charge at, all of that sounds quite inconvenient and I do not want it.…

> well, would be, I don't have EV This I think is the crux here. You don't have experience so you think how it would be different .. and different is .. bad? I have an EV and my experience is: - when I get home and I have a feeling that next drive might be long and need charge, I plug it in. Next day it's charged. - if there is a drive long enough to need charging (for me happens very seldom) I go and get a coffee at…

> when I get home and I have a feeling that next drive might be long and need charge, I plug it in

Sure, let me hang down the cable with electricity from the 3rd floor window of the apartment building I live in, that will work great. (Can I even charge the car from regular socket? I would hope yes, albeit slowly I assume.)

> You don't have experience so you think how it would be different .. and different is .. bad?

For me the car is a handy tool, so don't care much about "feel of the motor" or whatever. But the tool should be practical. So in this case, when I compare 5m to fill the tank and pay to 25m (Level 3, here [0]) to charge the EV, the gas variant comes out as superior. And the car itself is cheaper. And has bigger range (well, not that that one matters too much to me. Anything over 400km would be enough for me).

So I just don't see why I should prefer EV (disclaimer: I'm not sold on the whole "it's greener" thing, for multitude of reasons).

0: https://mechanicbase.com/electric/how-long-does-it-take-to-f...

> petrol car fill up was about 130EUR, the electric to do the same distance between 2 and 40 EUR depending price of electricity and whether I do fast charge.

At current gas prices, full tank is ~43 EUR for me (using conversion rate from google). At my income (low by US standard, reasonable by the local ones), that is low enough I mostly don't care about it since it's once every month or two.

Out of curiosity, might I ask what car did you drive before? 130 EUR for full tank sounds... like a lot. So I'm wondering if it was due to car being huge or due to gas price.

Re: Things people blamed on bicycles

#450

Post by walls »

atoav wrote: post #137
montebicyclelo wrote: post #114

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…

This kind of driver is the same that would accelerate towards you as you (legally) cross a road only to stop at a red light 50m behind you – a red light was clearly visible from where they were when they saw you. For them driving is just about their own emotion. The moment they see someone "who deserves it" their emotion takes over and their brain switches off. People like that should have their driving license taken…

I like that you had to specify 'legally' because riders in America basically never follow traffic laws.
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