Posted on 03/04/2017 3:15:02 PM PST by Morgana
I’m in favor of this proposal.
I agree. When I roll up to a stop sign and I see a bicyclist coming I always wave them through.
“I’d ask if they ever jaywalk on the rare occasions they get their load of lard out of the car. “
As a matter of fact I don’t! It’s dangerous enough crossing at the crosswalk and I’ve almost been hit by motorist on cell phones. I’m not bloody stupid as to jaywalk. Believe you me, if I’m going to complain about bicyclist not following the rules of the road I sure as hell am following them.
Problems we’ve had with cyclists have been them riding on the side walk. One missed me but hit an elderly woman, then kept on going. Don’t know if they ever found him.
Actually, all my years of cycling, I’ve found that stop signs are more like yield signs. If there are no cars approaching, I’ve always done a rolling stop. Fact is, many stop signs shouldn’t be there in the first place.
In many cases, it also increases the ire of the motorist, by adding to the delays of getting from point A to point B. The more restrictions on free travel, the more irate the motorist will get.
I'm not saying that motorists deliberately run down pedestrians and cyclists, but they are driving in an aggressive mood, trying to make up for lost time and they are taking chances that they might not have taken in the past.
I agree. When I ride my bike, I roll through stop signs. I also understand that ultimately safety is my responsibility, not car drivers who may not see me.
What insight! Personal accountability not government regulation of needed in this DND every other discussion re: additional laws to govern the masses. Less government oversight not more. And yes I spent a period of my life where I traveled exclusively by bike California,. Judicious use of the roll stop with proper care and observations make this in mind a moot issue.
Last year, in Colorado Springs, I was driving a rental and was unfamiliar with the area. I came to a stop, looked both ways, then started to make a left turn on a four-lane street. Suddenly I realized there was some kind of strange turn lane in the middle of the street, so I braked to a stop to figure out how to get in this unfamiliar turn lane.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a bicyclist behind me. He slammed into my car right as I started accelerating to go into the turn lane. I felt a bump at the back of the car and heard a thump, looked back and saw him. He was upright and riding and wasn’t yelling at me so I went on my way. Later I found a huge deep foot-round dent in the trunk of the car.
Scary. I was able to easily punch out the dent. The car must have been made out of aluminum foil. That bike rider could have been killed.
Around here, the bicyclists do NOT obey the rules of the road; and they want more and more bike lanes, yet they don’t stay in them, and ride 3-4 abreast.
They are pests. Nor do they *stop* at stop-signs or intersections. They already roll through them.
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.
We have a law that says a car must give 3-feet to safe pass a bicycle.
On Friday I was at a stop light. You know the ones with a red light? 3 “professional” (wearing funny clothes) bike riders never slowed down and went thru the light. Besides straddling the line and not riding between the lines for the bike lane, going thru a red light is just stupid.
Oh, okay. You've ALMOST been hit by a person on a bike in your car and therefore all adult bike riders are worth your disdain. Got it.
I think it's rooted in the idea that a lot of people on FR see bikes as a liberal thing. Not form of exercise, enjoyment for the rider or simply a way to be outdoors. All of that is considered "liberal". I've read posts in the past where they get a joy out of thinking about running a cyclist over and are applauded.
Really, I think it's partly jealousy (too fat and lazy to ride a bike) or it's a mental position that says "I'm too cool a conservative to ride a sissy bike".
Some people on these threads make FR look childish. To feel threatened by someone on a bike while in a car is so utterly ridiculous.
I ride a bike with my son for exercise. People either are cautious around us or downright intimidating with their cars. I truly don't understand the mindset that people on bikes are a threat to society.
I almost always try to give the bicyclist a lot of room. Well - except for the guy in the spandex when he somehow feels the need to ride on the edge OUTSIDE of the bike lane (free of debris, etc.) Those guys I don’t leave as much room for - mostly because there’s not as much room to give.
Just today I noticed some bike rider giving the finger to some car that had turned right onto the road at the intersection. I looked at the light and the other stopped cars - the bike rider had gone through the red light!
The guy could have gotten hurt or worse. I think making it legal to roll through the signs is a bad idea. Not to say that people won’t anyway.
I seem to recall that was an “ethics” question that was posed to my daughter in high school. Is it okay to ignore a stop sign on your bike when you have a clear view of everything and nobody is around? (Now, I don’t know how ethical I am, but I have gone through red lights in my car at 3 am with nobody on the road after waiting for 20 seconds.)
I think that's part of it, and some of this is caused by some bike activists who adopt a pointlessly adversarial stance as well.
Every city is different, and neighborhoods are different. I live in DC, on Capitol Hill. It's an older, historic neighborhood in an older city with a traditional, compact city core. It was built first as a pedestrian neighborhood, and expanded in the latter 19th century when the trolley line came out. It is inherently walkable and bikeable because it was built on a human scale to begin with, and because most of the attempts of the highway lobby to drive commuter sewers through the heart of the Hill have been defeated. Our biggest problem areas, the Southeast-Southwest Freeway (I-395) corridor to the south and the New York Avenue corridor to the north, are areas in which poorly planned arterial roads destroyed once-viable neighborhoods and created decades-long strips of blight.
Many of the far suburbs are at the opposite end of the spectrum, having been built as automobile suburbs from the start. These are the neighborhoods in which people are totally dependent on their cars for anything more than walking over to the next door neighbor. Their kids usually can't even ride to the local park because there's no sidewalk on the arterial road, so bikes can't leave the cul-de-sac, or because even the local parks are too far, having been built on the suburban idea that you're going to drive there anyhow. (City people walk to parks. Suburbanites drive to parks.)
I don't for a moment suggest that everyone should live the same way. The problem is that cities, above a critical threshold, reach a point of diminishing returns on automobile commutes. This threshold varies with local geography; natural barriers and chokepoints (rivers, bridges, mountains, etc.) lower the threshold significantly. One of the basic guidelines for sane living in DC, for example, is to avoid crossing a bridge in rush hour.
Anyhow, suburban commuters here are living with insane levels of congestion. They're frustrated and angry. They see bicyclists and pedestrians as simply being in the way. They don't stop to think that bicyclists and pedestrians are mostly local traffic, trying to move around their own neighborhoods. The suburban commuter is the invader, just sailing through, and he sees other people's neighborhoods as drive-through country. It's a variant of the familiar "flyover country" syndrome that afflicts our bicoastal elites. And too often, suburban commuters are far too casual about demanding traffic "improvements" that degrade the walkable, bikeable character of other people's "in the way" neighborhoods. (How many sidewalks and shoulders have been sacrificed over the years to create new traffic lanes?) This brings me to Sphinx's Iron Law #1 of transportation planning: Do No Harm to Other People's Neighborhoods.
Many suburbanites think that every penny spent on anything other than widening traffic lanes and creating new lanes is a waste. Their problem is urgent, and they are impatient. But we are now at a point at which short-term fixes for suburban sprawl have vanishingly little impact, at vast expense. Inside the DC beltway, the roads are at capacity. There is simply nowhere to put new arterial roads. Nor is there enough street capacity and parking downtown to accommodate more cars even if you could somehow build another commuter expressway into the core. (Which we can't.)
Two things are going to happen, and are already happening. One is gentrification, redevelopment, and infill. DC is now full of rather remarkable neighborhood turnaround stories. It is really nice to live without a serious commute. Live within a mile of your job and walk. Live within five miles and bike. On Capitol Hill, over 60 percent of people do not take a car to work. And this is in what has become a very upscale neighborhood; ditching the car is an amenity for which affluent people will pay, and being able to do so enhances property values. The second thing that is happening is that secondary job centers are emerging all around the metro area. All traffic doesn't need to go downtown. Of course, the region's transportation planners have historically neglected inter-suburban transit; we do have the beltway, which is congested, and a number of suburban connectors, but they have always played second fiddle to the hub and spokes model. But as satellite job centers grow, one of the challenges is to encourage the development of compact, walkable, bikeable neighborhoods around them to keep as many people as possible off the roads in emerging surburban downtowns. I already live in a neighborhood in which a majority of people don't drive to work. There is no reason such neighborhoods couldn't become common around the metro area if we build smarter. Want to help the exurban suburban cowboy with an extreme commute? Drain the swamp. Get people in inner-ring suburbs and the central city off the roads.
The long-distance spandex warriors have a much-misunderstood role in all of this. (I have never owned any such outfit; I bike in jeans.) In terms of numbers, they are too few to matter. We don't build infrastructure for them. The average bike commute is under five miles, and is mostly within, not between neighborhoods. The spandex warriors are what, in biology, are referred to as "indicator species." Their presence indicates that the underlying ecology is reasonably healthy. If you see a spandex warrior doing a long-distance bike commute, recognize that he is usually utilizing good neighborhood bike infrastructure for most of his route. If there are good bike connections from neighborhoods A, B, and C to D, E, and F, you will never see the spandex warrior on an arterial road to begin with. If you do see him dodging heavy traffic, it's usually because he's been forced to leave one bike-friendly environment and make an uncomfortable transit to hook up with another. (Or he's riding his unavoidable last few blocks on city streets with no bike path to get to his downtown office building.) A neighbor of mine did this for years, riding over 20 miles each way. Most of his route was trails and bike-friendly neighborhood streets. But you encounter gaps, and that's where the problems arise. Bridging the gaps is a good investment.
Cyclists have special rights because they are saving the planet.
“Cyclists have special rights because they are saving the planet.”
I found this video....let them keep telling themselves that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVXhg8zvkI
“Oh, okay. You’ve ALMOST been hit by a person on a bike in your car and therefore all adult bike riders are worth your disdain. Got it. “
Did you bother to read on? Did you see that that asshole did hit someone and that someone was an elderly woman? Did you also read that the asshole also kept on going like nothing happened?
Remember that episode of The Andy Griffith Show “Opie and the Spoiled Kid” well it was just like that only the “spoiled kid” was not some 8 or 9 year old snot nosed brat needing to be taken to the woodshed. It was a 30 to 40 year old man (who needed to be taken to the woodshed).
There are traffic rules but these cyclists think they are above them, now lawmakers are making them “more special” than everyone else. That is what the left does it makes some people “more special” than others. Well you know what? IF they get hit they get hit and I really don’t give a shit, not after this and other things.
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