Originally Posted by zeytoun
This is naive about the knowledge of motorists of the traffic law, imho. A more reasonable approach would be to control as much driver behavior as you can by your own behavior, and supplement with driver education.
I'm fine with supplementing with driver education.
I disagree with what I understood to be Randy's contention: that until driver's are "reeducated", educating cyclists is pointless.
Originally Posted by randya
Until the motorists are reeducated to clearly understand and observe #1 when it comes to cyclists on the road, offering the rest of this advice is sorta like pissing into the wind.
Do you really imagine that drivers understand (or even know) the law?
To a large extent they do, with respect to cyclist rights I'm sure it's very fuzzy (I know it's fuzzy among cyclists, and even police officers). But I find it to be very easy to let them know what they need to know while I'm "out there" in traffic through my own behavior.
Many cars will see you as a bicycle whether or not you act like a vehicle. It activates a binary fight/flight response, and unless they are a rational operator, many will pass you. Some, even when you are taking the lane 25 feet from a stop sign. That doesn't mean I cease to ride vehicularly. It means that a driver is uneducated, and about to get a lecture.
The terms "many" "rational" and "some" are nebulous and subjective. I don't mean that as a criticism. My point is that the cyclist can significantly affect, through his own behavior, how "many" will or will not act in a way that appears to be "rational" with respect to your presence. By adopting VC I have been able to reduce my encounters with "some" to be so rare as to be a nonissue in my cycling.
Didn't you recently post about a car getting pulled over and "eductated" by the police officer? Didn't you support and try to improve that education?
Yes, it happens, like the geezer who honked at me and got pulled over by an officer, but those events are so rare (weeks if not months apart) that they do not affect me in terms of my enjoyment of cycling or choice to engage in it.
I think Randya's point was that, given the lack of airbags and rollbars on bicycles, repeatedly telling cyclists this point is of little value, if you are not also educating drivers.... do you disagree with this idea?
Yes, I disagree with this idea, assuming "educating drivers" means "educating them more than they are already being educated today". Of course I believe drivers need education. But, based on how they drive everywhere I go, it seems like they are educated.
Cyclists, on the other hand, ride like they are not educated at all. If you pick car drivers at random, you can follow them for a long time, perhaps hours, maybe days, before they do something blatantly wrong. Most cyclists I observe do something wrong within minutes, if not seconds.
Relatively speaking, I believe there is very little room for improvement with education for car drivers, and huge amount of room for improvement with cyclists. I, for one, don't need the drivers out there to improve at all for me to be safe riding in traffic, even with my daugher on the trailercycle behind me.