Originally Posted by
Cheshire
Cyclists like this guy are one of the PRIME reasons drivers down here are so hateful towards bicycles. I'm with the city on this one, sorry. If you want to use the roads with the cars, you have to follow the same traffic laws. If you want to thumb your nose at "laws", then look at it as a PATTERN. When you disrupt a normally predictable traffic pattern by filtering, going through red lights, you lead drivers to think they don't have to be prepared to give a cyclist like me, who STOPS at lights and DOESN'T filter, the space I occupy between them and the car in front of me. If they're expecting me to filter because all the jackwagons have gotten them used to it...all those jackwagons are part of the reason my risk of getting rear-ended (or having crap thrown at my head out of passenger windows) is so bloody high.
I'm tired of stopping at a light just to have another cyclist blow past me and through the red light. Guess who gets all the hateful looks? Guess who's wheel the SUV creeps up on as a reaction to your blowing a red light? MINE. Because "all you cyclists look the same".
+several
All the people who claim "the cagers hate us anyway, whether we obey the rules or not" are just wrong - about me, anyway. As a motorist, I hate cyclists for exactly one reason: because I *can't* predict what they are going to do, and I have to focus all my attention on them until they're not in my vicinity - thereby putting me at risk because I can't pay attention to all the other drivers who are trying to kill me at the same time. I feel the same way about children and loose dogs.
I didn't post it at the time, but just a couple of days ago there was a *perfect* example of this. I'm getting ready to turn right out of a shopping mall when a bicyclist pops out from the other side of the intersection, riding in the pedestrian crosswalk. He startled me because I was looking for oncoming traffic in, well, the traffic lanes. I'd already checked for actual pedestrians and there weren't any. But hey, at least he was crossing with the pedestrian light!
So I figured he was going to get on the sidewalk. Nope - NOW he's a car! He turns left out of the crosswalk into the curbside traffic lane, right where I was going to go. Well, no problem there since I'm still stopped waiting for him to finish crossing the street (which he never did). So I pull out in my right turn after him, pick the next lane over, and notice that now he's in the bike lane.
Ok... why didn't he stay in the traffic lane? Or why didn't he pull into the bike lane initially? Who knows.
But we're now coming up on the next light, no more than 50 yards from where we started. We have a red, and the oncoming traffic has a green and left turn green. A car is coming up in the left turn lane. Oh, this is why he moved into the bike lane, I guess. He blows straight through the red, causing the oncoming car to abruptly slam on their brakes just before starting their turn. *THEN* he becomes a vehicle again, swerves across three lanes, which are of course now empty since he has brought traffic to a dead stop, and perches nonchalantly between the two left-turn lanes going in his direction.
That's at least three major violations in 50 yards of riding, and he was totally oblivious to all of the disruption he caused. I felt nothing but a steady seething rage at how entitled and disregarding his actions were.
And I was on a bike myself.
KeS