Originally Posted by
John Forester
Hurst can write all he likes about the unrecorded status of collisions from motorists attempting to overtake between a cyclist and traffic in the adjacent lane. I never wrote anything about that. My point was that this is one of the most frequent complaints concerning bicycle traffic to be read in the public press and in the cycling press. ...
You wrote: "The intent of controlling the lane is to prevent incipient motorist/motorist collisions, head-ons or sideswipes, with the resulting danger to cyclists as the overtaking motorist tries to extricate himself from the danger."
Translation: Danger, danger, danger!!!
Anyway...now you want to talk about complaints and not collisions, as it turns out there is very little actual danger of the sort you describe.
A "traffic problem," you now say, is a condition which produces a lot of "complaints." Your advice in the realm of lane-taking is based on complaints and press reports alone, because there is/are no data that support it. This you freely admit.
But even the frequency of complaints on this so-called traffic problem is highly debatable.