bakes1

I have been riding on public roads in a densely populated area of North Jersey for six months now and except for one clown in an ambulance blasting his air horn at me for fun everyone else in a motor vehicle has been courteous, well mannered and generally supportive while I ride.
Thanks all!

canklecat

Since resuming cycling a month ago after a 30-year break I've found most drivers in my hometown of Fort Worth have been very courteous. No serious drama, and the couplafew minor squeakers weren't due to negligence or indifference. Even when I got caught on a rural road with an unexpected amount of gravel truck traffic in both directions, nobody crowded me or honked.


Pleasant surprise because I'd quit cycling years ago after moving back to Texas from bike-friendly Southern California. First week of riding in Texas during the 1980s I had more close calls than in the previous six years in SoCal, mostly involving gravel trucks and yahoos in pickup trucks (I've driven pickups for years but was mostly immune to yahooitis).

Chris516

It all depends on who you ride with(if you do ride with another person), what you ride, when you ride, where you ride, why you ride, and how you ride.

This ranking: The 10 most dangerous states for cyclists?and the coverage riders need

Came out in April of this year. But it has Oregon as the third worst. Which, to me, made the ranking highly suspect. Since Portland is a bike-friendly city.

Saving Hawaii

Well, it's accurate. The problem is that it's a stupid metric. The metric is "cyclist fatalities / population". The easiest way to reduce cyclist fatalities is to not have cyclists. So places like Oregon, New York, or California, while certainly not utopias rank terribly by this metric because they have a lot of cyclists in proportion to the general population. Conversely Oklahoma is probably looking very good.

This is a good example of lies, damned lies, and statistics. But you should definitely buy the insurance they kept mentioning throughout the article because they certainly had no financial interest in repeatedly bringing that up.

I-Like-To-Bike

So called bicycling advocates and alleged bicycling safety experts/nannies have been relying on the use of "stupid metrics" and statistical manipulation about bicycling crashes to sell/promote their preferred specific/"safety" program/equipment for at least the last 40 years.

JohnnyCyclist

I once had a fire engine do the same thing. If he was on his way to a fire, I would have pulled over and gotten out of his way (no siren, no lights = no fire, I figured). I have pulled over when hearing a siren coming up behind me. As it was, I kept riding, and he obviously took offense.

Maybe he's one of those firemen who likes to set fires, had just set one, and was hurrying back to the fire station so he could take the call and go put it out