Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
Following traffic rules is one thing; following the advice of self appointed BF experts is another.
The OP, and any other non enthusiast/non bike club participant, may do better by taking bicycling advice from Vehicular Cycling dogmatist John Forester (and disciples such as John Allen) or from self appointed BF Wizards of the Conventional Wisdom about Serious Cycling™ with many grains of salt.
Even better to save such stuff for a later period when experience in their own cycling environment (the best teacher) will tell them just how safe and practical/impractical "expert" advice may be.
You may know from reading many of my earlier posts, this is exactly how I did it 7 years ago. No experience, no studying, no experts, I just started doing it and learned as I went. I can't say that it's the
best way to go about it but I can say that it's feasible and not nearly so difficult and dangerous as it may appear. In the past 5 years that I've logged daily, I have commuted by bike a bit over 1,000 workdays so I think I can reasonably say it's been successful.
I would expect it to be intimidating and probably dangerous for an inexperienced cyclist to emulate Forester (Vehicular Cycling, dogmatically) especially if he's not intimately familiar with how people react when driving. But all we
really have to do is keep an eye on them, be cautious and just do it. I advised OP to follow all of the traffic rules in part to make sure that the cyclist actually knows them. It's kind of fundamental in anticipating what drivers are likely to do.