livedarklions

Sorry, but I ride a lot on 55 mph state roads where "instant suicide" is no exaggeration. Feel free to try it, but I'm not going to in that context. I'm pretty sure DrIsotope was referring to something similar when he used the phrase.

As to the "never do" and "always do", refer to posts 4 and 8 in this thread. Ride on the right and a truck will kill you is exactly the kind of hysterical rhetoric we're referring to. OP seems to be backing down from that, but stuff like that is not unusual at all on bf.

And don't even get me started on how many "never ride in the door zone" posts and threads there are .

I don't know how old you are, but I suspect I've been riding on roads longer than you've been alive. Where I think where I have the big break with VC rhetoric is its basic hostility to the notion that a bike is a very different classification of vehicle than a car. Roads are a goddamn mess of awkward compromises between differing uses and priorities, from speed limits that are usually ignored to merging roads where lanes join with no clear rule indicating who has the right of way, to drivers who honestly seem to think that they always have an unfettered absolute right to overtake a bicyclist no matter where they are. I can pretend those complications don't exist because of an ideological commitment that they shouldn't, or I can adopt adaptive flexible strategies highly specific to the actual situation I'm in.