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I was hoping for a reasonable discussion from this place, but nope, once again the cyclist hate is out in full force in the comments to this very reasonable and balanced top-level post. Not one actual statistic about the actual danger from cyclists to pedestrians (vs. cars), just anecdotes about the one time a cyclist was really reckless and dangerous on the road that really pissed the poster off. As you state, cars are 8x more deadly to pedestrians (and this is not including to other motorists). And cyclists are supposed to be the arrogant, crazy, and entitled ones?
And that's also missing the fact that the real problem seems to be E-bikes, as you suggest, not analog bikes. Ebikes/mopeds/etc. are fundamentally different from analog bikes because you can easily reach much higher top speeds (whereas this usual requires being pretty experienced on an analog bike), you don't have to expend enormous amounts of energy stopping and starting (because you have an electric throttle), and your vehicle weighs much more, meaning it represents a much bigger risk to pedestrians than a 10-20 pound analog bike. Lumping analog bikers in the same category as those electric motorbikes is insane.
I understand the appeal of cars. They are fast and convenient and give you a lot of independence. But as a national form of transportation, they are incredibly wasteful of resources and space, kill tons of people, and make our cities and communities dysfunctional. And in a future on the downslope of fossil fuels, they won't be possible at the scale that they are now. I wish we would consider how to reduce our car dependency when we still have the surplus energy to do so, but I don't think these kinds of issues are on many people's radars here or in the wider world, so I doubt that this will happen.
As others have stated the bad behavior by ill behaving cyclists is just so so bad.
The other day I watched a guy on a bike run a red light in a LARGE busy intersection and nearly get hit by a car no less than three times while doing so.
How this person remained so unfazed (and also alive) is a mystery to me.
Brainless degenerates seem to be a minority of people behind the wheel of a car, but a common occurrence on bikes (probably driven by things like delivery drivers who do an outsized amount of cycling but are more dangerous than most).
Again, more anecdotes, not actual statistics. I don't doubt that you have had and continue to have these terrible interactions. But the statistics show that cars have at least 8x the rate of this behavior on average. Maybe we just don't notice because it's been so normalized, but the statistics don't show that ill behaving cyclists are any worse than the worst drivers.
Any time I walk in a city I see a cyclist do something brain dead and dangerous. Every time I see a cyclist I see someone running a red light or stop sign. I do not see someone do something brain dead and dangerous every time I drive a car. I do not see someone running a red light or stop sign every time I drive a car.
I am aware of the existence of catastrophically bad drivers, I've seen videos online. I've never seen one in real life.
I've seen catastrophically bad cyclists many times.
I see catastrophically bad drivers every time I drive. Running stale yellows, not understanding how stop signs work, literally every single highway merge at 70% the speed of highway traffic, a nice no signal jersey slide right in front of me, driving recklessly quickly through residential neighborhoods
Aren't personal anecdotes fun?
Catastrophically bad and regular bad are not the same thing.
You can't compare a half assed stop at a stop sign in a car to blowing through a stop sign or red light at full speed on a bike.
Yeah the former is common for cars, but the latter is common for bikes and not cars.
I don't know where you live that cyclists blow through red lights on the regular, but it sounds like the laws of physics should take care of that eventually. Unless you're talking about them doing it where there's clearly no traffic, in which case what's the problem? What's the danger? Are you just mad they get to and you don't?
They don't "get to." They are required to stop, just as I am (at least where I live). Some cars chose to disobey this, most to all bikes do. One of the reasons we have this as a requirement is because people can't be trusted to determine when it is safe to blow through stuff.
It's not safe and it is illegal and bikes break the law at much higher rates than cars do (with the exception of highway speeding for the obvious reasons).
why you think that yield on stop is bad and highway speeding is good?
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