Traffic's gotten worse in 18 years and it's marginal to begin with. It's a 2 lane road with hit/miss as to parked cars and how many. If I hit it at rush hour it's never been fun, and it inspired me to search out and find a much better set of side streets thru a convoluted neighborhood. The old way was straight, no turns for 2 miles, with maybe 1/3 of that occasionally stressful. The new way has one way going in, different coming home, thus I had to learn the route. Add's maybe 1/3 -1/2 mile.

This exactly. Its nice to know that someone else gets it. I've just been back from a week on the Oregon Coast. If a cyclist riding 101 thinks that they are going to take the lane for any reason and live peacefully... ... but in seven days of driving up and down the coast I didn't see any cyclists do that. Many, many times it simply wasn't possible to even put one set of wheels over the center line when going past a cyclist struggling up one of those 6%'s with a loaded trailer. I always tried to, but I would look in my rearview mirrlor and see that the car behind me would simply blast by the biker without moving over so much as an inch and call it good. What you guys call buzzing is... ... reality. I was thinking about this thread all week as I saw all those Oregon Coast cyclists dealing with the reality of multiple close passes day after day and I doubt many of them are posting or blogging about it. I've yet to see a cyclist "take the lane". I've said that here before. I didn't witness it, but there was a head on collision on 26 as we were coming back yesterday. My SO and I heard the BOOM and we came around the curve and cars were all over the road. One car was on fire and the other one had its front end completely sheared off. That double yellow center-line is DEATH to anyone who isn't properly respectful of it. Cars and trucks that would NEVER go over the double yellow to pass a slowpoke in a car, no matter how much s/he was annoying them, will slide over it and blast by a cyclist without a second thought. They think the cyclist is going so slow they can get around him or her in plenty of time to avoid disaster. Often they can, but if it were a car they would have given a lot of thought to how they were going to make the pass safely. When its a bike they do not. They do not scan the road ahead they just go for it. Cyclists have created this state of fear that causes drivers to think that they have to be passed with 3' of clearance and other niceties... ... ok if you are a cyclist (and I am) but... ... there is a downside. I don't know if that car was passing a cyclist when he collided with oncoming traffic but he could have been. There is a lot of anger around here about drivers that cross the center-line to go around cyclists. Just saying. Really, be careful what you ask for. In many places, Portland Oregon, and environs, drivers are extremely bike aware and treat cyclists very courteously... to their own detriment. That will have a backlash. Advocacy is good. Entitlement is not. Learning to hold a line, learning to share the lane, these are skills more cyclists need to develop.

H

I've been riding at least ~4K a year in Portland for over a decade. I have yet to see any sign of a backlash in motorist behavior on the roads. If anything, the number of angry confrontations has decreased from a few times a year to less than once a year. The only backlash I see in the Portland area is in the comment section of our irrelevant and dying dead tree media.

How you see this as an event that in any way informs the behavior of cyclists is mind boggling. This society turns a blind eye to the carnage, pollution, increased incidence of obesity, increase incidence of cancer, and enormous environmental destruction caused by motoring. The speed limit on Highway 26 should be dropped and agressively enforced with automated traffic cams and LEO enforcement. There is absolutely no reasons for motorists to feel entitled to speed along at 60 mph. Many modern vehicles show peak efficiency at 35-40.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/drivehabits.shtml

Our current speed limits are an absolute @#$*$#@ disgrace. I would strongly support a national 45 mph speed limit.

The problem is, modern vehicles are designed for speeds well above any current US speed limit (even the 85 mph ones), in many cases.

A national 45 mph speed limit would be simply ignored en masse. Just like the 55 mph one was. Law enforcement simply ignored it in many states, even.

The only way you're going to get 45 mph out of modern cars and drivers is massive traffic calming, and in ways that make the road nearly impassible to cyclists other than fatbike and MTB riders. And you'll never see that level on freeways.

I see that went well.......So you ready for another conversation yet?....:)

If it was me in the first vid, I'd be bailing into the ravine.

Oh lawds I just now watched those. My entire commute is on roads like that 1st vid, and thankfully I haven't experienced anyone passing coming towards me yet. But FWIW I always run my ExpiliOn 700 on daytime strobe during daylight hours. People have told me they can literally see the light flashing a mile away.