Kontact 

They can and they do. But as I tried to explain earlier, part of staying safe on the road is managing driver expectations, and blocking the road with two abreast doesn't signal that the issue is passing room but that the cyclists simply want to ride that way. Whether that is foolhardy on the driver's part to misinterpret or not, it is going to cause many drivers to become irritated and to pass more aggressively when they are able.


This isn't a "rights" thing, but purely optics and emotional reactions. Any stretch of road where one or more cyclists start building a backlog of cars that want to pass is a recipe for road rage. Cyclists that demonstrate that they are aware of the difficulty by the way they ride on such roads are more likely to be passed with care than those who look unconcerned with their impact on traffic.

Sometimes riding in traffic needs to be adversarial, but that is something to be avoided when cyclists have zero protection against both active and negligent aggression.



If we ride, or appear to be riding like a-holes, we'll get treated that way.