Wow. notalice has managed to get Miller and magellan01 to team up against her.
Never thought I’d see that day.
Are there a lot of highways that allow bicycles? There are signs all over the place on highways here prohibiting pedestrians, bicycles, and horses. Something else like “non-motored vehicles” rounds out the list. I’ll see if I can find a picture of one of the signs.
No driver I know or have observed deliberately ignores cyclists. That being said, I don’t like riding in the street. I will take a sleepy side street, but try to stick to bike paths. Major arterial streets are death traps for cyclists. Cyclists on the sidewalk expose themselves to other dangers.
I think that here in LA, if you are doing the cycling commute thing, you are a fool. It is only a matter of time before you are seriously injured or killed. While most drivers are courteous, there is subset of drivers here who are complete jerks. You might
Anyway, to continue my post after my computer froze…
We have a certain subset here in Southern California, notably Glendale, that hails from the Middle East and tend to drive AMG Mercedes and Beemers, and they must have very short penises, because they anger easily and are willing to drive in a reckless manner to prove some kind of point. For this reason, I stick to the residential streets and bike paths, and only ride recreationally. Again, if you are bike commuting in Los Angeles, you are a fool, get a metro pass or buy a damn car.
I am not saying this is a good thing, I am just saying it is a realistic attitude.
Good lord. This thread sure got… interesting, fast.
I know this is the Pit, but I’m too lazy to start a GD thread and I’d like to post on this issue. Mwahahaha.
Anyways, first, a caveat. I was unaware of Critical Mass, but hearing about them and their tactics I really am now starting to wonder if we don’t need some sort of new set of laws on the books and/or harsher enforcement to make sure that bike riders are held accountable for dangerous and socially irresponsible behavior on such a scale. That, and hearing about a few of them getting their asses kicked or getting arrested for false imprisonment for blocking someone in (or whatever happens to them for picking the wrong guy to threaten in such a manner if he’s armed) wouldn’t necessarily bother me all that much.
With that being said, onwards!
I always, without exception, do my best to maintain situational awareness when driving and will go out of my way to be courteous and, most of all, safe when dealing with other people using the road. I generally let ‘packs’ of motorcycles move together if they’re across from me at a traffic zipper. If the road allows it I will slow way, way below the speed limit and get as far over as I can when pedestrians/cyclists are walking on the side of the road because I am (most likely irrationally) very concerned about the possibility that they might fall/trip/slide/whatever and land in front of my car, at which point they, or their component fluids and solids, will become some sort of road-modern-art in my wake. Etc…
However. It seems to me that there are certain situations in which riding a bicycle is inherently unsafe not just to cyclists but to everybody on the road. If, for instance, you cannot keep up with the flow of traffic on a highway, you are not only endangering your life but those of any and all passing motorists. As the old saw goes, the only thing more dangerous than driving too fast is driving too slow.
It also seems to me that commerce/appointments/whatever are dependent on the orderly and fairly predictable flow of traffic. A road that is designed for traffic to flow at 30 miles per hour should not, in general, be slowed to 15 miles per hour because a cyclist has decided to take a leisurely ride down the lane. People have places to be, and the road network is first and foremost an example of an infrastructure designed for moving people and cargo from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. I would not, at all, be opposed to adding bike lanes all over the place, but it seems to me that many cyclists may be doing actual economic damage to the pace of business within towns/cities/whatever.
There’s also the fact that cyclists lose, majorly, in any collision with a car. In order for me to get my car on the road, there are certain minimum safety standards that must be met in order to pass inspection. And yet, a bike can get on the road with shitty brakes, no decent illumination/reflective gear, no means of effective auditory signaling, etc… It seems that if you are going to share the road that there should, at the very least, be minimum standards of vehicular safety that should be adhered to. It also seems that licensing would make sense. After all, you’re using a vehicle on the public roads, why shouldn’t you have to demonstrate that you know the rules of the road and can operate that vehicle safely?
Which brings me to enforcement. And although this is (and thus probably sounds :D) selfish, I think that one of the worst aspects of irresponsible and reckless cyclists is that they have the potential to turn drivers, through no fault on the drivers’ parts, into killers. Morally, I think that cyclists randomly switching lanes in traffic, zooming through stop sighs, whatever… is pretty much equivalent to selfish assholes who sit in front of a train in order to commit suicide, and force the engineer to live the rest of his life with the memory of being the instrument of death of a human being. For this reason, I would like to see some truly hefty penalties and serious enforcement of the traffic laws when it comes to all those who share the road, with no exceptions. Charges akin to reckless endangerment for buzzing through a red light would be a good place to start, it seems to me.
This is just off the top of my head. But I’ve felt for a while that there should be some sort of changes in how we do things in order to better regulate how all sorts of vehicles share the roads.
Thoughts?
Meh, never mind, didn’t notice the time stamps and the necromancy.
Maybe I’ll start a thread in GD or something.
There’s a current thread in IMHO for those with more to say – let’s let this sleeping dog lie.