Originally Posted by
UniChris
It goes round and round because you uniquely keep ignoring the actual facts in favor of things that are part tangential, part imagined uniquely by you in direct conflict with clear facts documented by the video and noted by essentially everyone else.
You're a smart enough cyclist not to make this mistake on the road in real life, too bad it's not reflected in your keyboard worrior-ing.
The part you do get right is that the active participants in this thread already have this sort of road smarts, but as the video clearly demonstrates there are lots of casual cyclists who do not. There are probably also plenty inexperienced cyclists who have or will browse through BF without posting in contentious threads. This isn't the best place to reach them, but it's not meaningless.
And I have to say my actual on-road strategy is continually refined by thoughts following from incidents I've read about here and elsewhere.
I suspect the difference here is that I actually read the linked article and am responding to the issues raised in it, and you keep insisting that anything not clearly demonstrated in the video is somehow tangential. And you also keep insisting that the video is showing things it simply can't given the duration of it and the angle from which it's taken.
Would I have shot that gap? Probably not, but again we're not able to see what it looked like from the rider's perspective so I'm a lot more reluctant to make all of the conclusions about this that you and a bunch of the other posters are doing. I do note that a lot of you are assuming you know exactly what happened on the far sides of the vehicle which you definitely cannot see, and that ALL of your assumptions favor the driver and passenger. And I and everyone else on this thread have one thing in common, there's no guarantee that the way we would have handled it wouldn't have caused us to get hit by someone else. The "this wouldn't happen to me because" statements that abound here are basically untestable and serve no good purpose whatsoever.
Mid-block in-lane drop-offs cause problems, we've got two riders on this thread who have ridden that area that say it's a prominent feature of the neighborhood where this happened. It does not take much thought to figure out that much of, if not the vast majority of, such drop-offs are going to be done by vehicles for hire. Lyft and Uber both have systems where the drivers are rewarded for dropping people off as fast as possible so they can go onto the next fare, and where the drivers will likely get dinged by a bad rating if they tell a passenger they have to wait for a safe exit from the vehicle. You want to call that set of things tangential, but it's a systematic feature of this kind of service.