For people riding with their saddle at the correct height it isn’t a matter of simply putting your foot down. First you have to unclip one of your shoes. While coming to a stop you have to lift yourself up off the seat and propel yourself forward and down over the top tube. Only then can you plant your foot. Then, to get back underway you have to simultaneously lift yourself up into the air and back onto the seat while simultaneously using your body weight on the pedal you pushed up on to propel the bike forward. Then you have to get whichever foot you unclipped clipped in again while at the same time trying to pedal fast enough so the cars behind you don’t get pissed at you for using up the stoplight trying to get underway.
I think the whole problem with you is that you thought the cyclist was wearing shoes that kept his feet permanently glued to the pedals and you thought that was stupid as hell, probably for several reasons as, as that would be if it were the case. Then, finding out he could have unclipped if he wanted to, and wanting to save face, you began to focus on other aspects of his behavior that in truth really aren’t that egregious, if at all.
You really don’t know enough about biking to be making these sweeping condemnations, let alone to be handwaving away what you’re told by way of explanation. Almost everything you say just exposes your ignorance that much more.
You started this pit thread that 1) declared that ‘people hate cyclists’ for something you don’t understand 2) was in essence complaining about a cyclist who was obeying the law.
95% of complaints about cyclists on this forum stem from illegal traffic actions, and here is one obeying the rules of the road and you go and find something else to hate them over - adding in a bit of whining about their clothing.
This is the part about the OP that got me. What does the cyclist’s clothing have to do with hating them? The OP comes off as a snob, sniping about the cyclists’ “stupid fashion choices”
The tone of your OP suggests you wouldn’t have left out anything that the cyclist did that inconvenienced you yet you don’t actually say he held you up at all. I suspect (as is certainly my usual experience) that whatever wobbling the cyclist did while waiting, he pulled into line and was away too quickly to bother anyone. Your OP is all indignation and no substance.
Most of the cyclists I ride with don’t. The closest I usually see is usually a newbie trying to balance precariously on both tiptoes at once. At any rate, planting his foot is what I imagined the OP would have expected, but maybe not.
No, In my pre-coffee state I managed to delete the mea culpa explaining how without coffee I had misread your post.
Now the OP…they pitted ME and justified HATING me because they were annoyed someone other person who happens to share the same mode of transportation as me was doing track stands.
And like most hatred it was completely based in ignorance.
I’d be surprised if you’re wrong, too. I imagine different groups in different parts of the country tend to do things somewhat differently. Hell, even among the larger group I ride with there are several sub-groups and each of them have their own ways of doing things. No biggie either way.
Here’s hoping you recover soon. I’m glad it wasn’t more serious.
I have my seat at a “proper” fitted height for efficiency and to protect my knees. When approaching a light I unclip on foot and lean while still on the seat making sure that the other foot is around 2 o’clock. I have no problem pushing down, and while I do slightly raise in my seat I have pulled my other foot off so that the peddle is in the correct position to clip in as it reaches 2 o’clock. I do sprint a few turns to get up to speed and I am in single sided SPD pedals but it seems to work great for me. I do have a custom frame that is a bit odd, it is more on the road race side of geometry and I am 6’2" so that may be part of it.
I would track stand if I could but have thus far decided to work on other bike handling skills.
As the OP demonstrated, I will not go through a lot of effort to try and make car drivers happy. I am not a jerk and I signal and try hard to make movements predictable. But their irrational hate and entitled attitude doesn’t justify trying to please them. It will never work, just as being a model minority never helps gain “respect”. The public roads are, despite their angry musings, not just for cars. And in an urban environment like where I live they are always next to me at the next light anway. There is a real mathematical reason behind that but it is useless to point out, they have placed bike riders in an out-group and they will just hand wave away any rational reasoning, exactly like the OP demonstrated in this thread. I am not a person in their mind, I am a bicyclist which is little more than an annoyance that they can not empathise with as they would with humans they can relate to.
It’s a good article but it misses one subtlety: not only does foreign-ness cause us to be hyper sensitive but familiarity causes us to become desensitised.
Which means that not only are many motorists hyper-sensitive to cyclist misdeeds, they are de-sensitised to motorist misdeeds. This leads to a huge imbalance in perception: motorists don’t just press down on the scales of lawfulness on the cyclist side, they lift up on the scales on the motorist side.
Anyone who has participating in the eternal debates on this subject would have seen how it plays out: there’s always an anti-cyclist motorist who says cyclists are waaay more lawless than motorists until it is pointed out that (for example) speeding is pretty much universal amongst motorists. After which usually there is silence or a change of subject, as the motorist realises that this is undeniably correct but had totally failed to impact on their view of themselves previously.
Well the usual reaction to the topic of speeding is to handwave it away "that doesn’t count - that’s safe, and everyone does it!’ wheras the misdeeds of cyclists will bring about the end of society.
My favorite thing to point out is cell phone usage while driving - a deed that is most unsafe and has a constant body count. Drivers usually try the ‘don’t point out driver misdeeds to cover cyclist misdeeds’ tactic.
One thread a couple of years ago that was not about cyclists but was about drivers not coming to a complete stop at stop signs. The excuses for this behavior were just appalling and several cyclists reading the thread were saying how they were gonna bookmark the thread.
The thing that gets me is that the OP is complaining about a law-abiding cyclist. This makes him a perfect data point for my ‘Magic traffic wand’ theory - The theory being that if I were to wave a magic wand that forced everyone - cyclists and drivers - to obey the rules of the road the following would happen:
Complaints about drivers by cyclists would decrease almost to nothing
Complaints about cyclists by drivers would actually increase.
Until you bring out actual stats about how much speeding cars kill and injure and how little cyclists blowing off stop signs actually hurts anyone. At some point the penny usually drops for all but the most obtuse motorist. And in any event what you say just really reinforces my point: everyone is desensitised to their own bad habits.
Of course, but you must remember while drivers may bark that from their cars, in the online world there must at least be the veneer of a reason to demand that cyclists “Get off the road!”:
“Get off the road, because cycling seems dangerous to me”
“Get off the road, because cycling here seems crazy from my driver’s seat”
“Get off the road, because some of you wear spandex and in my mind that makes you Lance Armstrong wanabees”
"I saw a cyclist do something I’m not 100% familiar with, so cyclists should get off the roads!’
“Cyclists act all entitled and stuff when they are driving on my roads, they should get off them!”
“I once encountered a cyclist who broke a traffic law so they should all get off the road and out of my way so I can go 45mph in a 25mph zone!”
“Cyclists should get off the road because the city built a Multi-use trail somewhere in the city that is covered with dogs, rollerbladers and joggers - they should use that!”
“This road seems too dangerous to bike on from my perspective as a driver - you should get off it!”
“I might feel bad if I hit you while eating with one hand and texting with the other so get your bike off the road!”
How much you want to bet that if the cyclist -had- come to a full stop and put his foot down etc, the OP would be bitching and moaning about the cyclist being in his way while he got going again, etc?
Or they would just use the “one guy” from 1974 who scared them as justification.
The typical “model minority myth” mixed in with the “ultimate attribution error”.
All to justify them being outraged by the “injustice” of another human delaying a trip by seconds or in the case of the OP just overdeveloped feeling of entitlement and superiority.
Speaking as someone who cycled 4500 km last year, 99% of which was around town (London). Clipped in pedals whilst riding in urban, ie. frequent stops going to happen, seems a really bad idea. Yeah, i know it’s more efficient, but it’s not as safe. Sometimes, especially on London roads, you need to put a foot down in a hurry.
Not really, after using them for a few weeks it becomes natural and even when riding flats I twist my heel when I pull my foot off. I live in Seattle and our infrastructure is even worse than yours I hate to say. I was envious of your road surfaces when I was there last time.
In an urban environment it is actually much nicer as it is easier to bunny hop and you can accelerate much faster. Plus there is reduced risk of slipping off the pedals.
I have bike shoes that look like skate shoes, I don’t even bother taking them off during the day so even that is not an issue.