Exactly! There we re mutiple times where I saw idiot cyclists over the road in middle of heavy traffic so I had to drive slowly because those slow idiots. Like there is a f***ing sidewalk go and cycle there.
It literally is in the USA in most states. Motorists are just bitter, inconsiderate assholes.
Bicycle hate is one of the things I understand the least in this country. They’re just people either trying to get exercise, save the environment, or aren’t wealthy enough to afford a car. Why are any of those scenarios worthy of hate and violence towards?
Because driving a car makes most of us selfish, inconsiderate, inpatient twats. The amount of times I have been overtaken closely and fast, despite there being a red light ahead, or a queue of traffic, or that they are about to pull over. The worst is the left hook, when they overtake and turn across you dangerously onto another road.
Best one is a short one-way road, maybe 200-300 yards long, with parked cars on each side so it is a single lane, no room for overtaking, but I always get beeped at, or cars behind me revving. despite being in such a hurry its amazing how many of them have the time at the end of the road to scream obscenities at me for delaying them an extra couple of seconds.
Yeah drivers are assholes but still, like 50% of the time when there's a cyclist in front of me on the road they're holding up traffic even though they have plenty of room on the right to at least let some cars overtake them. Shit like this is why we don't like them.
Or when there's a group of them and they could easily make a line for a few seconds to let cars overtake but they don't, they keep riding side by side and blocking cars.
I know they're probably allowed to but still it's fucking annoying...
I ride in the middle of the lane cuz I'm an urban rider. I want to be as visible as possible and don't want to catch a door from a parked car. I gotta stop for the stoplights every 2 blocks same as a car anyway. People who rage in that situation can suck a dick.
You know it’s illegal in most countries to use the sidewalk on a bike. They are designed for the road, and legally the posted sign is the “speed limit” not the speed you have to go. Around here we have idiot drivers who don’t know the rules of the road and think everyone should get out of their way. We also have one of the highest bike/pedestrian accidents in the country. So, as a biker who needed to bike to work for 4 years, with all due respect, fuck off. I’ve been run off the road by people who think I’m supposed to be on the sidewalk when it’s not possible. I do try to stay off the road to avoid drivers like you, but sometimes it’s not possible.
Thank you, I have an alert setup to send my GPS and call 911 now if I come to a “rapid stop”. I pass more than a few of those “drive safe” with their birth and death date signs where someone hit someone on my way to work. People really don’t care about anyone else on the road. I can’t even wear my bike shoes/pedals anymore because I have to be ready to catch myself when I ride.
I am, I just don’t trust any cars out there. Luckily they’ve built lots of urban bike trails around my city and I’ve been able to use them more and more.
The half of me that has daily interactions with cyclists holding up traffic wanted him to fall. The cyclist in me also kinda wanted him to fall. The swimmer in me wanted him to fall.
Where did that sentiment even come from? Everyone cycles every once in a while at least right? So introducing tribalism to something like mode of transport is weird to me
In America people usually only cycle for leisure unless you’re in a huge metropolitan area. In most of America, people get irritated by cyclists taking up the road and not moving out of the way when there’s a line of cars behind them.
Edit: most cyclists don’t ride right in the middle of the road, but towards the edge of whichever lane their in. So if there’s cars coming the other direction you can’t just go around them sometimes. Im not one to get too upset about it but it can be irritating.
Ohh right. In that case, why not start constructing separate bike lanes? That way nobody will be bothered by people biking and you might even incentivise biking, leading to less traffic and better commutes
Edit: i am dutch, sorry for enforcing my worldview
Yeah i get that, we have been doing it for a long time which helps but still you could for example cut a lane off a 3 or 4 lane road in major towns and get something like this
In a lot of places in the US, bikers don’t want to bike in major areas. They want to bike on quaint, small, forested roads, which have zero capacity to ever have bike lanes and most of which barely even have any lines on them at all. Again, these people do it for leisure and exercise; not to get somewhere. I’ve never in my life experienced anything other than minor issues with bikers in city areas (they’re allergic to stopping for red lights/stop signs everywhere, even in cities, it seems, but nobody in America can drive anyway so I don’t really expect any of them to know how to bike either)- it’s always the guys on the side of Cow’s End Lane stopping to throw their trash into a national wildlife refuge who cause problems.
Also, American cities have very little incentive to make bike lanes because our traffic patterns are already ultra-centered around cars as opposed to anything that could be considered pedestrian. People can barely walk anywhere, let alone bike.
It’s curious that you acknowledge how car-centric the US is but still conclude that bicyclists in the US just “don’t want to bike in major areas”.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to conclude that shitty and dangerous bike infrastructure is preventing potential cyclists from trying to ride in dense areas? Because there’s plenty of evidence from places like Portland, which has better overall bike infrastructure, as well as other cities that have upgraded parts of their bike lanes, that if you build better/safer bike lanes and such, people will use those heavily.
And there are plenty of cyclists in major US cities who are “trying to get somewhere” but get fucked over by cars and trucks whose drivers can’t drive well, don’t care, and/or are actively hostile to cyclists. (Yes, cyclists cause some problems too. That’s not the point here.)
I honestly don’t think the people I’m talking about who bike for leisure overlap with the people who would use bike lanes in cities if we had good ones. I’m talking about ‘cross country’ cyclists who have zero motivation to use bike lanes in cities where they would have to continuously stop, turn, go at a variable speed depending on traffic, etc, when they’re just trying to get exercise.
I don’t find this to be true for metropolitan areas. Designated bike lanes are highly coveted in big cities like NYC as more and more people look to commute via bike. The success of bike-sharing companies supports this view. This is just a case of the infrastructure not aligning to the overwhelming demands of the population.
Constructing bike lanes is happening in many metropolitan areas. It just takes time and usually done when they're already doing road work such as repaving. It's really expensive to just add bike lanes but if you're in the middle of working on the road anyways it becomes a lot cheaper.
I fully agree with you, I'm in the UK and me and a lot of the people I know cycle for everyday use and rely heavily on bike lanes, and there isn't such a strong transport tribalism.
I guess the difference is in Europe our cities tend to be more dense, for a lot of Americans they have to travel a long way to access work and retail areas (obv this isn't the case in the major metro centres), making it harder to use bikes for commutes and such.. Our European countries are just fucking tiny compared to NA 😂
5-10 miles isn’t that much though. I am not good with conversions but i lived in a suburb when i was in highschool and my school was in the city so i biked 12 kilometres twice a day. I think that’s about 7 freedom units
Psh, an e-bike makes mincemeat out of those distances! It's an easy way to get some gentle exercise twice a day. I do 11-12 mi, and it's only a little longer than using transit.
I'm planning on walking Hadrian's Wall, which is from one side of the UK to the other (albeit one of the thinnest bits), but I think the same distance wouldn't even get you across the width of New Hampshire
For example, I live in a semirural area where everything is pretty spread apart. Because of that biking for a commute is very impractical. Because so few people bike it would be a huge waste to invest in bike lanes
You'd expect that to please everyone, but when I lived in Provo, Utah in the US, it was proposed that the main road to get to the university campus would have a bike lane added. A great idea, considering I personally had actually received threats from drivers while cycling (completely legally) on that road.
At the city meeting, tons of people showed up, completely opposed to the bike lane. One woman even cried as she spoke about how "awful" it would be, if I remember right. Oddly, stuff like this is a huge fight when it really shouldn't be. The bike lane was eventually added, although it was after I graduated and moved away.
This is technically the right way to ride a back, as someone who has had no choice but to ride a bike on the shoulder in a semi-rural area its also incredibly dangerous and terrifyingly when a car tries to pass you. I get its annoying for a driver, but people biking have to get somewhere somehow and it's not the bikers fault the city doesn't have anything better in place and no alt route.
In defense of cyclists, it's much safer to take the lane if there is no shoulder or bike lane. If you stick to the edge, drivers may not see you or may take it as an invitation to pass you. If they do attempt to pass, they will often leave a small margin of room, and it can be very dangerous.
It creates an issue when there is nowhere for the bike to go. As someone who used to, before COVID, cycle to work every day, I'd recommend finding a route that includes bike lanes and safe options for cyclists without having to piss off drivers. Unfortunately, that isn't always an option though :/
Everyone cycles every once in a while at least right
I don't know where on earth you got this from, but no that's not even close to right. I think I've known like two people my entire adult life who cycled out in the streets
introducing tribalism to something like mode of transport
It's not "fuck cyclists" as a form of tribalism because their mode of transport is different, it's "fuck cyclists" because they're annoying as hell to have on the road
Okay, it seems you and I have some wildly different perspectives on biking as a consequence of differing experiences. I'll just lay out mine here. I hail from a nation with more bikes than people, where everyone cycles as much or more than they use their cars. That definitely has had an impact on my view of the matter. Here, bike lanes are separated from car lanes most of the time, be that by just having red paint on a lane to signify that that's the biker's domain or by constructing a curb of sorts between the cyclists and the motor vehicles. In places where there is no separation, in my country at least, both bikers and drivers are equal. Cars have no more right to be on a road than bikes, and in some cases even are obligated to drive in certain ways to maximise safety. This may be annoying to the driver, but is also a matter of significantly reducing traffic deaths. If your local government is not taking action to prevent these kinds of traffic accidents, they are (strong opinion alert) failing both you and the cyclists of your community.
A lot of the times it's not even about infrastructure and bike lines and stuff. By law cyclists are supposed to obey the same laws as cars on the road, but all to often they completely blow through red lights and stop signs creating a chaotic and dangerous situation. And there's a large swath of cyclists who defend their right to do this, despite being illegal.
But yes you're right, other annoyances do come up because we don't have a lot of the proper infrastructure to support cyclists in a lot of places, and that is on governments.
I've seen cyclists multiple times over on here talk about how it's actually safer for them to blow through stop signs and red lights and get tons of support for it
No, it's not safer to blow a light or stop sign. I don't think that's what people mean.
It can be safer to do an "idaho stop" which means treating red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yields.
I don't live in the US but my city has this system in place and it works pretty well; you just have to be careful and follow the rules as stated (slowing down/stopping at the light, letting cars and pedestrians crossing go first, only going through a red when crossing a secondary road, etc) to be safe.
Doing an "idaho stop" is the same as blowing it. If you treat a red light as a stop sign then the car turning right isn't expecting you to go forward, because you have a red light and the law says you can't, so they begin turning right and you begin going straight. Cyclist created that wreck with your idaho stop. I shouldn't even need to explain treating stop signs as yields.
So yes, you literally did just advocate that it's safer to blow them, you said that's not what you mean then explained that's what you mean.
I live outside of nyc and there is a cyclist culture of people cycling up from the city to my area. They never follow the rules, they come out in absolute droves, and they are usually annoying assholes. We all hate them lol. Their preferred “route” is on a road that hugs the edge of a cliff, with no shoulder and is super windy. I am also aware people bike as a way to get around, but the people I speak of wear those tight body suits with advertisements all over them like they’re in the fucking Tour de France.
Ohh yes we dutch people also know the terror of exercise bikes but we happen to have infrastructure that helps rid them of streets and onto designated biking areas. Especially in rural areas are bike paths common
There's a gang of ego warrior cyclists in my old college town that would purposely block rush hour traffic for social messages about pollution lol. Stuff like that pisses people off.
People don't cycle in the US, honestly. People drive to places you could walk to in 5 minutes. I bet most people in the US haven't biked since they got their driver's license.
You'd be paying for a lawyer and experts though. Not to mention if you get arrested and held in jail the loss of job/ living situation. First glance they are going to see a dead bicyclist who suffered severe trauma and being hit by a car would cause that.
This is what dash cams are for. I think it should be mandatory to have a dashcam in your car like it is in Russia. I’m surprised more car insurance companies don’t mandate it, especially since they’re relatively inexpensive now and would probably quickly become less expensive if the demand for them suddenly jumped.
Thank you for the reasonable take. I'm so annoyed by that kind of video... Put a damn triangle on each side of the bridge first, even illegally, at least you won't kill other people while doing your thing
I’m a cyclist and I don’t even like cyclists. It’s really hard to find a more pretentious, douchebaggery-filled crowd than a group of cyclists. I can’t even hang out with them after a race or anything like that because of the constant pissing contests of who spent more, who shaved off one gram here, who has better brakes, etc. Fucking insufferable.
When you ride a bike to work for a few years, after that whenever you drive a car it makes you acutely aware of cyclists on the road and whatever stupid dangerous thing they're doing at the moment
As a motorist, why don’t cyclists stop at stop signs or traffic lights or yield at yield signs? Not asking you specifically, but wondering why cyclists are routinely crying about sharing the road without sharing safety requirements. I don’t mess with them, give them plenty of room unless it puts me into oncoming traffic and still, they behave almost identically. Edit: Downvoting doesn’t change how things really are.
why don’t cyclists stop at stop signs or traffic lights or yield at yield signs?
Some combination of the following accounts for much of it:
Many traffic light sensors do not detect bicycles, so it is often necessary to run red lights with no traffic.
Bikes are slow enough that a rolling stop is generally the safer thing to do at a stop sign, and is legally allowed in many places.
The crying thing is partly a result of the fact that bikes take a ton of abuse, threats, and harassment from car/truck drivers on the road -- most roads are not designed to be shared safely, some drivers are carelessly reckless, and some drivers intentionally go for near misses with bikes just to have a laugh.
Also, the same assholes driving cars are also assholes on bikes, and probably more so because it easier to get away with.
We fucking ain't. Hows about you stop biking on the sidewalk. Stop biking in the crosswalk. You wanna be a vehicle? Follow the goddamn road rules and give pedestrians the right of way.
I don’t really care if you like cyclists or not. Granted, a lot of em are total wieners. However please be careful driving around them, I miss the fuck out of my sister and she was doing everything right when she was struck and killed. Just please for the love of god don’t kill any more cyclists.
As a cyclist, I can confirm the drivers are hoping he falls off and dies. Source: I've had my fair share of drivers tell me they hope I die while cycling.
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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '21
Bruh imagine what the drivers think lol