I'm one of those annoying cyclists that head to the middle of the road when its narrow or has poor visibility. Its not to deliberately annoy anybody, it's to discourage impatient drivers from squeezing me into the barriers, the curbs or ditches.

I love it when somebody honks their horn and yells insults at the dire inconvenience of having to slow down for 100m, because it means I have been seen and said driver didn't kill me.

Its nothing to do with apathy and greed and everything to do with the insufferable entitlement of people who take knobs like Jeremy Clarkson seriously.

The calculation for car-saturated cities is that each drive takes as long as fastest alternative mode, and no faster. Which kinda makes sense to me - as you build more infra people chose to not drive, making driving a lot more fun for the die-hards and the ones where that's not an option.

(I'm in the UK where cycling on the pavement's not allowed, unless it's a marked cycle or shared lane, not sure if that's different in other countries).

And "infra" can be planter boxes and moving paint, for a start.

This thread was a reminder that even in the Netherlands, when you design roads for higher speeds and try to change that by plopping down a sign, it doesn't work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_u...

I drive a 7,500 lb diesel pickup truck as my weekend “I’m going to the boonies to play with my man toys” vehicle. It’s a big and imposing vehicle that I operate responsibly. On longer highway trips I tend to lay in the speed limit into my cruise control and simply cruise (fitting eh?) in the middle lane of a 3-lane road or the right lane of a 2-lane road.

Guess what? I get honked at for driving too slowly even when I’m traveling at 70 mph that also happens to be the speed limit.

Just yesterday an especially irate specimen became upset when I was using the left lane to pass at 70 mph (otherwise known as the speed limit) to go past a very large truck that was using the right lane at 60 mph. Someone honked at me, flashed their headlights, then eventually passed me, got in front of me, and performed a brake check on me.

Imagine how upset this wheeled menace gets when they see a cyclist taking the entirety of a narrow road! Sigh.

Cars feel impatient behind bikes even when travelling the speed limit.

Also, if cars that aren’t able or willing to travel the speed limit are not forced to pull over for faster traffic… you’ve never been stuck behind a truck, old person or tractor?

To be fair, I've had this as a driver too. Everyone has seen the driver in an outside lane cut across two lanes of traffic to take a turn that they were in the wrong lane for.

I would recommend getting a bike and trying it out. It makes you a better driver, because being considerate of other road users is its own reward.

A cyclist doing something stupid is unlikely to live long and is mostly a danger to themselves.

well, I survived a few years of daily stupidity on two wheels.

Technically and legally yes, but in practice it's the minimum you are expected to drive.

>I would recommend getting a bike

I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby.

No, it's not. Far from it. A speed limit of 70mph on a motorway is not the minimum, just because you, or other vehicles want to exceed it.

A speed limit of 20/30mph in a city center is not a minimum; it's actively dangerous to exceed it, and if you regularly exceed these you are a danger on the road.

A limit of 60mph on a national road is often granted based on road classification rather than the actual road; There are numerous A roads in Scotland that are _not_ safe to travel at 60mph for large stretches of due to poor road camber, poor visibility, narrow lanes, etc.

> I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby.

This is a dangerous and unpredictable way to cycle, and can lead to cars overtaking you when it's dangerous to do so/they're not confident to do so, in the same way that an unconfident driver travelling at 40mph on a motorway is dangerous, or a car driving in a hard shoulder to allow overtaking is dangerous.

98% of my driving is not in city centers

>A roads in Scotland that are _not_ safe to travel at 60mph for large stretches of due to poor road camber, poor visibility, narrow lanes, etc.

Slowing down for safety is different than going slow just because you feel like it.

>This is a dangerous and unpredictable way to cycle

It's not more dangerous that being a pedestrian. I'm already off the road before they even get close. I can trust that drivers can stay on the road.

What's your point here? Are you advocating that drivers have no responsibility when it comes to road safety?

For context, everyone else's point is that both drivers and cyclists are struggling to maintain a safe environment because good infrastructure is lacking. But I just can't see your angle here.

So if you were in London you would never get to the destination?

I don't live in London, but if I were to do what I do where I live I would just push my bike around assuming there are always cars driving near me.

I'll take "things that never happened" for two hundred, Alex

Not in terms of infrastructure. A mistake that planners often seem to make is to build "cycle lanes" that resemble footpaths: lots of zig-zags, stops and starts, clutter, obstacles to manoeuvre around, and diversions at junctions that make cyclists take longer routes than cars and force them to give way to all other traffic.

The best bike lanes resemble motor traffic lanes: straight and continuous with as few interruptions as possible.

If you build bad cycle lanes, most cyclists just won't use them and you haven't really solved anything.

This. 100% this. The county highways around where I live have a paved shoulder that is as wide as a full lane of traffic. I routinely cycle on that shoulder safely with cars zipping by me at 55-60 mph and no one gets angry about it.

But I do run into the bottom 1% of drivers occasionally (usually at intersections) who either simply do not see me, despite the fact I'm wearing fire-engine red kit and have flashing headlamp and taillight in broad daylight, or choose to ignore that I'm there and intentionally put me in danger.

There are a couple of longer-distance high-quality road cycling trails around here (one is ~50 miles long, the other is ~120 miles long) but they are an inconvenient distance away. The other park-style trails around here simply aren't meant for road cyclists, for reasons that you've noted already.

Of the clutter can be insane, there is a new, 3 meter wide path, and some donkeyballs-brained perdon has installed a lamppost, a large metal 'internet box', and some other metal box duagonally across the path, so you can't cycle through it any more, and get through on a wheelchair!

At least in the part of Australia I live in the only roads that are 100km/h are highways and bikes aren’t allowed there. I’ve yet to see this particular scenario. I don’t want to say it doesn’t happen but I don’t think it’s as common as it’s made out to be here

I do 100% agree on separated lanes with barriers or dedicated paths for bikes. Keeping it separate, even as a dedicated bike lane with a small barrier is so much better than trying to share the road with parked cars or crappy pot holes.

Ultimate I also think people just need to learn empathy. Loosing a minute of your commute isn’t worth getting angry.

I cycle a lot in inner London - zones 1 - 2 ish. There are a few cycle lanes, paths through parks, canal towpaths, etc, but mostly, i'm on the road. For me, that's fine; traffic is never very fast, and the next junction is never far away, so there's a mix of overtaking cars, being overtaken by cars, and each of us blocking the other for a little while where there's no room to overtake. Also, there are a lot of bus lanes, which are even better - fewer vehicles, and less likely to misbehave.

I occasionally cycle in outer London, and there, i'm glad of the network of long-distance cycle paths, sparse though it is. Speeds are higher, and drivers are more impatient.

I once cycled in Swindon, including across the White Hart roundabout. I won't be doing that again.

Not that the side roads were bad. Cars were better behaved than they are in Ireland anyway.

I recently had a ride from Bük to Csepreg which was mainly on a separate cycleway by the road. From Csepreg I was able to enter forest tracks which were very beautiful. I've also noticed quite a bit of new infrastructure in various parts of the country.

I can imagine Hungary becoming a very appealing cycling destination if they continue to develop the network.

As Cory Doctorow put it recently, geometry is against cars.

I used to bike commute and I never caused this.

I also can't remember the last time I've seen this in real life as a driver.

Sometimes I get stuck behind a bicyclist that I'd rather not pass because there's oncoming traffic but that never lasts much more than 1 or 2 blocks and is inconsequential to my travel time.

When you're "done" with infrastructure you tend to get spectacular collapses.

So vehicular cycling is both wrong and right at the same time. Correct as in guiding laws and behaviors when no infrastructure exists, but at the same time wrong in guiding new infrastructure. It should strictly be seen as a stop-gap, a measure only in place until infrastructure is in place.

Until then and in those places vehicular cycling is exactly the right thing to do.

I think this discussion often suffers from people thinking they have to find one correct answer for all situations. That‘s not needed. We just have to know when in which context vehicular cycling is the correct answer.

Is because passing legislation designed to protect cyclists with dedicated lanes and clear up the roads for cars would require the votes of people who hate cyclists, and everything they think they represent.

I disagree. Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car. Keep the cyclists away, in their own area. This makes for easier rules based on consistent behavior of the participants.

Sometimes I wonder, why cyclist complain about the dangers of cars, while on the other hand they are a thread to pedestrians.

I think that every form of mobility has its own rules. Pedestrians walk fast at around 6km/h. Average is maybe around 4. A cyclist is way faster than that.

That's just not true. A car weighs well over a tonne, and can comfortably travel at twice the speed any random bike can in a city (15mph on a bike in a city center is snappy, 30mph in a car is achieveable by the time you've cleared a junction). The impact of being hit by a car at 20mph and being hit by a cyclist at 20mph are also completely different for a pedestrian. You are far more likely to sustain serious injuries by being hit by a ton and a half of metal than 100kg of metal and squish.

Biggest problem with cyclist is not what they are fast driving and behave aggressively. It is what they do it where people don't expect them.

And your whole comment reads like "You were made to an improvised bowling pin by a 100kg person a on a 25kg bike? Praise God it wasn't A CAR".

"Well thanks. Maybe a car would have been better, because it just would had driven over me and killed me, instead I'm now have a broken base of the skull and disabled down the waist."

I don't say cyclists kills people, of course not, you need to have a very bad circumstances for it to happen (mostly - hit the head on the pavement or have a great weight disparity, like running over a kid), but arrogance of many cyclists (just as like as arrogance of many pedestrians, especially on bicycle lanes TBH) coupled with speed and weight is a dangerous combination.

OP's comment has a light "bicycles are less dangerous than cars" fleur in it. Sure, of course 1000kg would always be heavier than 100kg (m * v = F; I know), but the problem is what we don't (or at least shouldn't) compare cars with bicycles here. We should compare how dangerous are both to pedestrians.

That's not OP said, they claimed "Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car".

In the UK, drivers kill about 500-1000 pedestrians a year, cyclists maybe 10 at worst...

If you've ever been hit by a cyclist going too fast, you'll have a very opinionated story to tell. If you've ever been hit going by a car too fast, you're just a faceless member of one of our more embarrassing statistics.

Happened all the time to me on the way to work (cyclists zooming by, no collision fortunately, but some VERY close calls). Not the best to be honest.

The only way you get equal outcomes is that if both impacts will kill you.

There's a fundamental difference between the danger posed by cyclists and the danger posed by motorists. Cyclists have significant 'skin in the game' and can easily be hurt more in a collision with pedestrians. Motorists, meanwhile are unlikely to be hurt when colliding with either pedestrians or cyclists and so they can often get complacent about the danger they are presenting.

The UK is currently re-wording some of the Highway Code and an important part of this is the concept of responsibility - the faster, heavier vehicles bear more responsibility to keep everyone safe. HGVs>cars>cyclists>pedestrians

Cyclists are neither pedestrians nor cars, and (I assume?) generally both groups would prefer the other had to deal with them. So, as a cyclist, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

> Sometimes I wonder, why cyclist complain about the dangers of cars, while on the other hand they are a thread to pedestrians.

Because, statistically speaking, cars are a way bigger threat to cyclists than cyclists are to pedestrians. Here's an article fearmongering against cyclists [1] (notice how even the link says "cyclist-killed...two-pedestrians-every-week", even though the true figure is "killed less than 10 pedestrians every year, compared with hundreds killed by cars"), compare it with the government's report for road casualties [2].

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/863550/cyclist-killed-bicy...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

Although I agree with your larger point, this is obviously not true.