Bad cyclists giving us all a bad name

[KelOnWheels]

I ordered myself a bright orange waterproof messenger bag. Then I felt better

[UrbanEngineer]

Cyclists say they do this for multiple reasons. I’ve heard them say being at the front makes them more visible, so they filter through the traffic and if the vehicular traffic ends just before the crosswalk, they will plop themselves right in the middle of the crosswalk. I call bs on this. Why? Because I’m not driving a car, and they filter past me and plop themselves right in front of me as well. I think they just want to jump the red. If they wait behind the line, they can’t see the cross traffic down the road clearly nor are they close enough to the intersection to squeeze quickly through it and jump the red. I get shoaled like this by rlj cyclists a dozen times a day and there seems to be no end to their lack of respect for the pedestrians and the other cyclists around them. I just lead by example and eventually, once they get their heads out of their asses, they’ll queue up behind the crosswalk too.

[americancyclo]

There should be space at most intersections between the stop bar and the crosswalk. This is where I usually post up, although it can get tricky with cars making a right turn from that lane.

[GuyContinental]

Last night I ended up at the intersection of Lee & Kirkwood and deliberately posted up in the crosswalk- why? There was a line of cars wanting to take a right on Kirkwood and “owning the lane” or even posting up on the right side would have prevented traffic flow. I felt that occupying part of an empty crosswalk was the better call vs pissing off a line of cars.

Also it’s a location where I will pass the endless queue of cars waiting at the light so that I can get a jump on the climb up Lee (EB) at the green (no, I won’t run the red). On my whole return commute, the 200′ between Kirkwood and Highland leaves me the most exposed to crazy car behavior- right hooks in particular. Anything that I can do to be visible and predictable in that section is worth it.

One side note- cars have to slow down once on Highland so I get to have educational discussions with drivers when I catch up to them at the speed humps… it’s one of the few places where that’s doable.

[DSalovesh]

As a driver I do the same.

I used to average about 15K miles a year, drove a lot of cross-country road trips in my youth, and did one three month stint where I covered 75K in a (quite over loaded) 28′ box truck. My last moving violation was in 1992 and I’ve never had a collision since I got my license in 1983. These days I’m pretty strict about keeping to the posted limits, stopping fully and behind the line at lights and signs, signaling every turn and lane change. My annual mileage is pretty low lately (thanks to biking everywhere) but I still do 4-5K a year – almost all in SUVs.

You know what?

I get tailgated, honked at, and passed closely for going too slow and stopping too long. They ignore my signals to zoom around me, and they break the laws and violate our road-use social compact all the time.

WHY DON’T THEY HEED MY FINE EXAMPLE? Don’t they know I’m trying to be an ambassador for good motoring habits, and to stave off more extreme enforcement crackdowns through speed and red light cameras? They’ll never build more roads if we use the ones we have in this way, and if injuries or deaths from people driving like that don’t drop somehow I’m worried that funding for new roads will be cut and/or the basic privilege to drive will be increasingly regulated or even curtailed.

I’ll tell you what:

The drivers who do this aren’t thinking about me or anyone else, other than themselves. It’s pure selfishness, and it would be silly to try to reduce other people’s selfishness by increasing my own self-righteousness. I just drive my own vehicle the way I know I should and let others go on their own ways as much as I can.

And it’s the same with cyclists. This idea that bad cyclists give us all a bad name is no more valid than saying it about bad drivers. Cyclists have an un-earned bad name that our own actions cannot repel. Discussions like this threaten to fragment our small community and distract us from the things that really matter, like engineering our urban spaces to provide safe and useful infrastructures for bicycles, or engineering our laws and judicial system to support the systems we already have.

Give me a city I can cross on a bike with my kids and a feeling of security and belonging that equals how I feel driving across it and I’ll stop making up my own code of conduct for how I survive biking in a city that lacks that.

[DaveK]

^^^ The best post.

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