jwarner

Depends where you are at. In my town, depending on what road you are on, you don't "take the lane" or "flow with traffic." You become the lane and traffic flows over you until someone manages to stop it long enough for the meat wagon and the cop to show up to scrape what's left of your sorry bones off the road surface and pin a ticket to the zip lock bag they put you in.

To give you an idea of the climate here, we recently had an lady who had just smoked a couple of doobies to cut her hangover from the night before, go through a red light, and run over and kill a 19-year-old kid legally riding across a crosswalk with the little green dude shining away in the crossing signal. The lady got off scot-free. I'm no lawyer, but summarizing from the reports in the papers, cyclists and pedestrians must yield the right of way to automobiles here, even in situations such as I just described. Welcome to oil town. I know it isn't like this everywhere (and that is kind of my point).

I'm all about cyclist's right to the road, and ride in the road a lot, although I would say I still have a lot to learn as I've only been doing it for about 30 years on two continents in multiple cities, and sometimes (often) in weather that would have a lot of folks holed-up in the house.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with you, am not looking for drama, and am quite possibly misunderstanding your intention. I do think it is unwise to marginalize the risk one takes when riding in the road, especially in a public forum such as this. I also think it is unwise to marginalize any tool or technique that someone might find helpful when it comes to cycling around traffic. As I said, I ride in the road often. I also ride on MUPS, on the shoulder, in gutters, and am not above hopping up on the sidewalk if it is the safest place for me to be and it isn't hurting anyone else. In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to do this. It isn't a perfect world, but I'm not quite ready to check out of it yet because I let a concept overrule common sense and situational awareness. If I see "bubba" rolling along in his General Lee commemorative model F-350 climate changer with black smoke roiling out of twin stacks to the beat of Charlie Daniels singing something about rednecks... I darn sure consider all my options before hopping on out in front of his IH8BIKES license plate screaming "I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE HERE." Not saying I wouldn't do it, or don't do it, but it has to the best of my options at the time. This isn't always the case.