As an experienced bike commuter, I wonder how you feel about an issue that bugs me. When I was young I was taught to ride against the flow of auto traffic so that I could see cars coming. When I taught my kids I told them the same thing, but that has been countered by every other authority they have come into contact with, all of which instruct them to follow the same rules as cars, including riding on the same side of the road. I do all my riding on a trail, but my personal feeling is that if I were riding on a road I would not ride with car traffic. However I know people who have been ticketed/warned about riding against. If you really follow a rule that you're invisible when riding, then it would be hard to justify riding with auto traffic, rather than against, wouldn't it?
There are two things at play, that have really cut into what roads I will ride on.
1) Distracted drivers. And it has no relation to age. I see old people using their phones, I see young people using their phones. This is number 1, by a huge margin, and it is just getting worse. I never use my phone, other than for navigation, while driving. Not even hands free. Leave a message.
2) Bicyclists that don't follow the rules of the road. Stupid young kids using both side of the road, and sidewalks, I sort of understand. We were all stupid young kids at some point in our lives. But there is no excuse for stupid adults. If you have a drivers license, you know the rules, they are not that hard. Where I live, more than two thirds of bicyclists ride to the left, against traffic. Lately, maybe as much as three quarters. My kids (young adults) all ride on the right, when they ride. They were taught that from day one. Does no one teach bicycling to their kids?
So I am out riding, trying to be aware of the roadway, blind spots, cars (worse, trucks on narrow roads), and as I crest a hill I meet another bicycle coming straight at me. WTF?
So, I'm going to make one general comment that is sort of a reply to everything. We have to stop making bike policies based on the actions of uneducated cyclists and drivers. Nobody will learn anything without being taught. There are a lot of comments that say, "cyclists make driving dangerous". This is probably true; there are a lot of cyclists that can't bike safely on the road. The solution is not to punish those that can safely share the road; the solution is to teach people how to safely ride their bike in traffic. Then they won't be annoying, they'll be fellow safe road users.
Similarly, we need to educate drivers in treating cyclists respectfully. Don't tolerate running stop signs; that's illegal. But you must tolerate cyclists that are taking the entire right lane because they think they need it for their safety. Look behind you, change to the left lane, and overtake on the left. Don't be annoyed, because this is how roads work. There is going to be traffic and some of it is going to be slower than you. That's why there are multiple lanes. Relax, drive intelligently, and you won't even notice the cyclists because they won't seem any different from any other traffic.
Bicyclists should not be able to share the road with drivers in the cities unless they vote to become a primarily bicycle-based cities. Bikes were not meant to share the road with cars.
I often see bicyclists ambling along in front of me at 20 m.p.h. and even if they're to the side of the road I still have to slow down to avoid any risk of hitting them, with cars coming up behind me. I'm usually forced to change lanes on short notice, which is dangerous.
In my experience, most people don't have a great understanding of what keeps cyclists safe in mixed traffic (i.e. not within a protected lane), and how opposed those things often are to the law. As a former professional urban cyclist, I constantly broke the law to keep myself safe, while keeping my first priority never to endanger pedestrians or other cyclists. A kind of Three Laws where the unarmored travelers come first, then myself, then the folks in big steel boxes.
Cyclists need a different set of laws on the road for everyone's benefit. But people have become so inured to the constant threat and frequent (and often fatal) harm of motor vehicles, that they fixate on and exaggerate the threat of cyclists, and illogically insist that they need to follow the same rules of the road as cars.
Cyclists should follow rules of the road -- special rules created for a special vehicle.
I know that for a lot of people in the US, their experience with bike commuting involves being stuck behind a bicycle on a road that doesn't have bike lanes, causing a certain amount of free-floating antipathy towards bikers.
The whole notion of treating bicycles as vehicular traffic was wayward and has been debunked. It's really obvious that bicycles are not cars, you can tell just by looking at them.
There are differing levels of enforcement in different places, but I've made thousands, possibly tens of thousands of infractions on my bike in 35 years of commuting, sometimes right in front of the police, and I've never had a ticket. Is a rule really a rule if it isn't enforced?
If I say everyone needs to wear clown shoes to work on Wednesdays, is that a rule? It doesn't mean jack-shit because I can't enforce it.
Drivers are held more carefully to the rules of the road, but given that they're ensconced in a protective metal shell, they have a lot more leeway with the law of the jungle. With cyclists it's the other way around.
I'm a driver. In the past, I've been a cyclist. At other times, a pedestrian. I mean to say, I'm not saying this from the perspective of a guy who drives and has never cycled and can't empathize with people who live a different way. If my current living situation allowed me to resume cycling, I'd be happy to! But-
As a driver, in NYC, bikes on the roads are incredibly dangerous to everyone involved (though, admittedly, mostly the bikers). You can't drive in the city for a day without seeing bikers regularly violating the rules of the road: wrong ways up one-way streets, jumping onto sidewalks, etc. Generally, just acting like cars when they want to, like bikes when they want to, like pedestrians when they want to.
That's not why I'm against sharing the road with them! That's why I'm in favor of heavily enforcing existing laws on bike usage, with a merciless iron fist until people who ride bikes act like they understand that they're meatbags riding around in a pinball machine of 1-ton iron rockets.
I'm not even against sharing a road with them because enough of them exemplify the above that all of them, as a result, are unpredictable, and unpredictability is the most dangerous thing on the road. I kind of imagine the enforcing, iron fist, etc. will take care of that eventually, too, if we actually do it.
I'm against it because they're vulnerable little meatbags. A slight hiccough on the road between two iron rockets means someone's paying out an insurance premium and getting some fender repairs. The same accident with a bicyclist ends in a trip to the hospital, if not a funeral home. One person's dead, and the other is carrying the moral (and possibly legal) weight of a murder, because someone thought it was a good idea to play tag in a busy factory. My opinion may not hold across all locales: certainly I've been in cities that had far less busy roads, with far fewer and smaller cars (Europe), where this same statement does not ring true. But in NY it does!
I'm sorry. If the cost of removing that ridiculous situation of danger is a short-term lack of bicycle commuting while we build responsible infrastructure, I'm OK with that. But for what it's worth, I'm also OK with kicking in my tax dollars to build that infrastructure.
I'm not anti-bike, just anti-this ridiculously unsafe road interaction.
Wow, you did that every day? Controversial opinion to consider, if you have the attitude that traffic laws are only for cars and serve only to inform bicyclists of the expected behavior of cars, riding in the Bay Area becomes much safer and faster. Habitually running red lights is important as it gives you an open road and a red light behind you. Also I always filter to the front(which I think is legal), abuse cross walks(I.e. get off my bike to stop traffic and walk it across a pedestrian crosswalk, also legal I believe). I biked in the Bay Area for years with that strategy and never had a problem, during work hours on week days I could beat cars handily on short trips. Some people will say this gives biking a bad name, but I think bicyclists getting hit by cars is a far bigger problem for the PR of cycling.
My most frustrating commutes (in the US) are when I get unlucky enough to share a two-lane road with a peloton of bicycle commuters.
All the cars slow down and move over a lane to pass them, which slows down traffic enough that you get stopped at every traffic light. The bikes lane-split at full speed through the stopped cars and the red signal, which means you're playing hopscotch with them for miles and traveling at half the speed of a normal day.
If they bothered to obey the traffic laws, on the other hand, it wouldn't be a big deal -- you slow down, pass the slower vehicle, and move on.
Can we write a law where cyclists cant ride on a main thoroughfare when there's a perfectly good side street a block away?
The amount of times I've seen traffic backed up for miles behind one exercise man, on a MAIN ROAD, when there's a perfectly good barely used road, literally ONE BLOCK away.
I'm all for being considerate of bicyclists but that goes both ways.
You have definitely seen cyclists following the rules, you just don't notice them.
The "rules of the road" were made for cars, not bikes. Bikes are inherently different and should have different rules. Cars and bikes should not be riding side by side in cities.
I thought the article would list out some of the rules that cyclists break.
I'm sure 100% of people break some rule at some point, so saying 100% of the participants admitted to breaking some rule, is like saying 100% of people fart in public.
But, anyway, for the 18 months or so that I biked to work, I tried to follow the rules. Yes, I rolled through some stop signs. (Don't we all, no matter what kind of vehicle we're piloting?) The much slower speed on a bike makes it easier to look at all incoming lanes before you enter the intersection.
But, I've had close calls in a car with cyclists. I've had close calls on a bike with cars. I once went over my handlebars when some doofus bolted across the street on a bike without looking. People are bad at following the rules of the road. It doesn't matter if it's a car or a bicycle.
I get what you’re saying but as a cyclist totally disagree. The problem I see at least while I was in SF, cyclists generally believed since they were riding a bike, they had the right of way in all scenarios. I still have vivid memories of almost smoking a cyclist while on my motorcycle only for them to be mad at me when I tried to explain to them that zipping in between lines of cars will get them run over. If you are to mingle bicycle son the same roads as cars, they need to follow the same rules.
I disagree agree with poster, but to play devils advocate bicyclists are a free rider problem on public roads. It's pretty clear based on the design of most roads they were designed for motor vehicles, not bicycles. Fuel taxes are a major way these roads are funded and maintained, and bicyclists don't pay registration / licensing / fuel tax. Especially in heavily urban areas, roads have extremely high land value that bicyclists are unjustly profiting from.
It's not clear to me why there should be any right for bicyclists to be allowed on the road.
I'm not convinced that a majority of cyclists understand that they have to follow the same rules as motorized vehicles. It's unusual to see the driver of a car blast through a stop sign without slowing down at all. It happens, but not that often. On the other hand, it's unusual for me to see a cyclist who doesn't run stop signs.
I can see why: because you're going slower and have a full view around you. But that's still not an excuse if you're going to play the "cars and bikes are both vehicles" card.
In my experience as both a cyclist and a driver in the Bay Area, I have no interest in the opinions of other cyclists on driver behavior. Cyclists largely disregard the rules of the road and then blame drivers.
As a driver, I have been at the receiving end of abusive gestures and language even when following the law. In one case, I yielded to a bicyclist who was in blatant violation of the law[0], because failure to do so would have endangered him. He showed me his middle finger. Another was angry that I was in the bicycle lane making a right-hand turn, as required by law and common sense.
As a cyclist, I have given up trying to educate my fellow cyclists, and generally won't ride with others anymore.
[0]I was already turning through the intersection after having made a stop. The bicyclist arrived in the middle of my turn and entered the intersection without stopping for the stop sign.
Bad drivers give little space to cyclists regardless.
Buses, cars, trucks have often traveled behind me at a following distance of barely a meter behind my bicycle. Stopping suddenly would have high risk of death.
Cars and trucks have clipped my handlebars.
Cars turn in front, oblivious to cyclists existence. That or they have a complete lack of awareness: a cyclist needs braking distance like any moving object.
Not to mention opening doors or the drivers who think it's funny to harass those not in a car.
The reason why I am opposed to such laws, as a cyclist, is the intent is to harass cyclists. My area has a law that forbids vehicles from passing within one meter of cyclists. The police won't do anything if a motorist actually strikes a cyclist unless there is injury. Yet motorists want the same standard actually applied to cyclist. Notice the asymmetry?
(Incidentally, I do ensure there is clearance when I pass and I avoid passing on the right. But that has more to do with being predictable and valuing my life than the law.)
It's rather funny that the cyclist who rides downhill at 40mph outside my home every day classifies cars as the hazard and not himself, since he must ride on the road and not the footpath. He's no different to the guy who was riding at a similar speed on the footpath outside of my work. Apparently that was OK, you see, because if he was on the road he would have been riding the wrong way on a one way street and there was no way he was going to ride around the block to get on the southbound road. He nearly hit me every day after work for a month, because he was cutting blind corners at speed.
What about the two who were occupying a whole traffic lane, weaving back and forward to stop cars overtaking, while riding at under 15mph in a 40mph area? They'd start screaming like lunatics at anybody who legally overtook them - the cops wanted a word with them, but they disappeared when they saw me on my phone.
Five or six times a day, cyclists run a red light at a busy intersection in town. I see many near-accidents in my fleeting times in that intersection, all of which are caused by the cyclists - and I'm not counting the number of times they've nearly hit pedestrians crossing with the red light. I've seen one car run a red light, three years ago, since I started crossing there in 2012.
Years ago, I was overtaken by a cyclist and his three children, just as I had begun my turn. I nearly ran over the father, and they took their sweet time to move through the intersection a car coming the other way (who legally had the right-of-way) had to stop and wait for them. I could have got out of my car and walked, and I would have got to the other side before they did. They bumbled along as if they'd done nothing wrong.
It's not uncommon for cyclists enter intersections on foot, and so legally become pedestrians for the duration of the crossing, and then jump on their bikes and dodge through traffic while hurling obscenities at vehicles who have right-of-way because they didn't enter as pedestrians. The law here doesn't change your status because it's convenient for you.
Back in 2013, one of my ex-workmates told me quite a tale, about the time she pulled up at a set of lights. When she moved off she signaled to change lanes and only noticed by chance that there was a cyclist holding onto her car to get a free ride. He couldn't have seen her signal, the indicator was near his foot, and if she had turned he would have toppled in high speed traffic, perhaps ending up under her wheels.
Back in the early 1990s, a friend of mine was pulling out of his garage and was hit by a cyclist at some speed - the cyclist threatened to call the police, but stopped short he would have been charged, not my friend.
Don't lump it all on drivers, cyclists are dangerous, too.
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