Journalism and Cycling 2: the difficult second album

tomasrojo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122527533#Comment_122527533

Yeah, I remember him disliking the #andacyclist thing. He does think a lot of things are ridiculous, and he tenatively was defending the Irish Times article about cycling infrastructure being just for middle-class people.

(As I often say, people break the rules that they're able to; motorists can't really make a habit of going the wrong way down busy one-way streets or breaking red lights once the traffic in their lane has come to a stop; cyclists can't break too many speed limits.)

buffalo

Wasn't there a RSA free speed survey that had a figure of 81% of motorists speeding in one dataset? I think it was on 30kph roads.

magicbastarder

on 30km/h roads, i think it was higher than that, over 90%. well, one dataset anyway, may not have been RSA.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122528237#Comment_122528237

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122528270#Comment_122528270

It reached 98% one year, possibly 2018, before slipping back into the 80%s.

But the bould Donald only sees cyclists breaking traffic laws.

magicbastarder

i have found that it's pointless arguing against the 'cyclists break reds' argument; because plenty do. the subtleties of the argument are usually lost in the noise, and i've recently made headway with a 'yeah, so?' response.

i was able to point out to someone recently that my entire vehicle weighs less than a single tyre on their car, which was an easy metric to illustrate the folly of the false equivalence. (and yes, i also then acknowledged the total weight of cyclist plus bike).

also that when a motorist breaks a red, the burden of the risk involved falls on other road users; but with a cyclist, the burden of the (much lesser) risk falls on the cyclist.

tomasrojo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122528309#Comment_122528309

Yeah, it does actually annoy me when people using any transport mode break lights, and in particular there's a right turn I have to do on the cargo bike where I have to cross Luas tracks perpendicularly and turn sharp right and my path after the turn is often suddenly blocked by people on bikes choosing that exact moment to run a red light. In fact there are a few parts of my regular routes where I have a very short time window to cross a junction or complete a manoeuvre and I get blocked in the middle by people running lights on bikes.

It's just part of the city's rich tapestry of dumb egotism though.

Paddigol

I'm firmly in the live-and-let-live camp when it comes to red-light breaking on a bike. I'll be stopped on my bike at a red light and see cyclists carefully proceed through, and think nothing of it. Other times I'll be shaking my head as some numpty blasts through a busy junction at speed. Then there are times when I'll break my own rules and roll through a pedestrian crossing where the pedestrian has visibly already crossed before they got a 'green man'.

It kind of boils down to what should be the underlying rule for taking part in society - 'don't be a d**k'. It doesn't really matter how nice you are as a person, or how considerate, caring and even careful a person you are, if car drivers were given discretion as to when they obey traffic lights there would be carnage on the roads, both in terms of traffic congestion and injury. This clearly is not the case with bicycles. Why we can't just take an adult approach to it and recognise that bikes aren't cars any more than pedestrians are, so can be accommodated differently when it comes to road traffic rules, is beyond me.

I've concluded that 99% of the time when this topic comes up, people just want a moan as opposed to having a genuine concern.

tomasrojo

I think I should have said that it "micro-annoys" me when people run lights. Depends on how outrageous it is, but I'm not on the verge of dismay or rage all the time.

Stark

I mean the way I see it, traffic lights are there as a prioritization measure rather than a safety measure. If it was really the case that people can't be trusted to show judgement as to whether it's safe to proceed or not without reliance on the lights, how are they meant to navigate the myriad of junctions without signal control? The idiot who blasts through a red light in busy traffic without looking is the same idiot who's going to blast out of side road junctions without yielding. In a lot of countries, it's perfectly legal to make a left (or right in countries where they drive on the right) turn on a bike while treating the red light as a signal to yield to traffic, so it's a legality thing rather than a safety thing.

The one time it annoys me is if pedestrians have the green light and someone cycles through them without any due care or consideration.

tomasrojo

Yeah, blasting through pedestrian crossing time is the worst.

Most people are breaking lights with some care with regard to motorized traffic, but I'm definitely getting very little due care and attention from people on bikes waiting to cross some junctions when I'm crossing on the cargo bike (with the lights in my favour).

It's just mildly annoying. This isn't therapy time for me!

Paddigol

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122528734#Comment_122528734

Yeah, its the lack of consideration that annoys me too. People who cycle like the roads are their personal playground are as annoying, though nowhere nearly as dangerous (I mean to the point of almost not even registering on the scale) as drivers who do the same thing. I just don't get it. We all make mistakes now and then and may breeze through a zebra crossing not having spotted the old lady waiting to cross, but some people are just unrepentant d**ks who know exactly what they're doing but couldn't care less. In a way, I stop at red lights as a kind of public antidote to them. A cycling jesus-on-the-cross, if you like. I'm pretty much a saint.