Originally Posted by
Hypno Toad
Only one quote said that they block their hearing with earplugs (I'll give you that one). OTOH - not one post advocated listening to music loud enough to block hearing anything else - there are questions about what hearing the car behind you does for your safety. I see these as very different - questioning why hearing a car approach is important versus advocating for blocking out sounds of the world with loud music.
At the end of the day, we agree on the use of music while biking (or walking or jogging or ... ) - listen to your tunes, just don't make it difficult to hear the world around you.
For the funny side of this topic - I have a booming voice (I can typically get people in cars to hear me with their windows up), so when a person on the trail is clearly not paying attention and has their music too loud ... I can get them to wake up and pay attention (and typically jump).
BTW - Don't discount the trail users that are too engaged in a conversation with the person next to them to pay attention the world around them ... and of course they are shoulder-to-shoulder, block the whole path. I could make a long-long-long list of dumb and distracted and unsafe behaviors on MUPs.
Several (more than one) outright do say they block it out and don't care, and I disagree about the rest it's very obvious for instance mattthehat is doing that or he would not even be asking such a silly question.
The mods also vandalized I mean 'cleaned up' the thread and removed the most hilarious bits where they were blaming the girl with earbuds blaring who died right in front of a forum member for not looking before turning left. True she should have looked (assuming she didn't) but if the car was speeding you can look and suddenly not be clear one fraction of a second later, while you would have heard if it you were not impaired. I can understand why they deleted that and the part about deaf riders but seriously, some of this is ridiculous.
You can't eliminate stupidity but when you combine stupidity with impairment then you get big problems. Since I ride reasonably and don't pass people quickly and have a heavy steel bike and wheelset I don't really care about pedestrians much unless they start talking smack to me because they will just injure themselves and honestly I probably won't bother to stop in that case. But people should not be thinking they are safe when they are clearly not. And if you're not hearing the cars and other bikes you definitely aren't that safe you have a large blind spot.
Anyway not calling you out or anything, just clarifying my position and what I have seen in this thread.