shelbyfv

Your reading comprehension is no better than your social skills. I didn't lie. though I may have been mistaken. Guess I'll have to dredge through your unpleasantness and find the evidence of cycling.

TC1

Says the person who waded into a thread with nothing but an inaccurate ad hominem attack -- which is considered rude in most social circles.

Well then you should change your password, because someone apparently hacked your account and looked me up -- well before you claimed not to have.

If you pay attention, you might even learn a thing or two in the process. Good luck with that.

PeteHski

It depends what you mean by "safer". I often ride on our local rural roads, which are "safe" in the sense that there are not many minor accidents. But then more often than I personally find comfortable, we get accidents like this one:-

https://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/new...wycombe-crash/

and this article outlines the number of cyclist fatalities in Buckinghamshire

https://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/new...ckinghamshire/

"In Buckinghamshire, all fatal cyclist collisions have involved a vehicle and, in some cases, more than one."

Now there have been a few fatalities on the bike paths too, but the ones I've seen reported have been due to obvious rider error eg. losing control and hitting a tree. Things that I am confident I can avoid, so they don't really concern me. It's the main reason that I actually prefer mountain biking to road riding. There is just more personal control over the risks, even though the risks are statistically higher. So given the choice of riding my bike through the city on a bike path vs busy road I will always take the bike path even if the statistical risk of having an "accident" may be higher.

I'm all for safer driving and stiffer penalties, but I still prefer to be segregated from vehicles that can kill me outright without warning.

shelbyfv

I couldn't find any accounts of actual cycling but I did find a pic of part of a bike. The thread is a hoot. Here's the next one tire delusions. Plenty more after that. I think posting history is useful as it may prevent the unaware from being led down a rabbit hole.

tomato coupe

... and a foreshadowing of future interactions.

rsbob 

After spending two weeks in your fair country this summer, before COVID struck eliminating our third week, we enjoyed driving the countryside from Bath, Oxford, Wales, Conwy and points east and west. What amazed me are the brass balls it must take to road bike in your county since there are zero shoulders, narrow roads in places with no escape and some fast drivers. Hats off to any and all road riders - I would instead go to gravel or mtb instead. People here in the states have it made even without bike paths.

TC1

There's only one reasonable way to define "safer" -- and that's places with lower injury and death rate. And that's not the Redways in MK.


And dedicated cycling infrastructure only serves to relocate some of those crashes from road sections to intersections -- it doesn't change the frequency, and if anything, tends to increase the severity ( all else being relatively equal, a cyclist is better-off getting side-swiped by a vehicle traveling in the same direction, versus getting hooked or T-boned ).

We all obviously make our own personal choices about where to ride -- but that doesn't excuse lobbying for the continued waste of time, money, and lives on construction that is not beneficial to cyclists, especially not when better strategies are known to exist.

I wouldn't expect a random citizen to be familiar with the failure of dedicated cycling infrastructure, but it is very disappointing to find that almost none of the cyclists here are aware. No wonder the lot of cyclists, with regard to safety, isn't improving -- even cyclists appear to be clueless about the problem.


Well then you might have to stick to an exercise bike. A head-on collision with another cyclist can be fatal, even before we consider electric motorcycles. There's also an argument to be made that you might be safer on a quiet road versus a busy path. In my area, we have one of the finest pieces of dedicated cycling infrastructure in the United States -- an 18-mile off-road path used by thousands and thousands of cyclists daily, for all manner of trips, that doesn't even have many road intersections -- and I know a significant number of serious cyclists who will not ride it. I think they are crazy, and I love riding it, but it is true that fatal head-on collisions have occurred, and the proliferation of electric motorcycles is making it worse by the day.

Hell, yesterday I was riding in the woods, and came across two bucks having a disagreement over some does -- without warning, the loser, who was still a very considerable animal, rapidly changed his mind about continuing the battle, and nearly took me out as he bailed out at around 30 mph. I'm sure glad he missed me, but there's no way to "segregate" against that.

TC1

Yeah, that was, I think, the first time I tried to ask for help on these forums -- and I learned how bad of an idea that was. Now I stick to offering help, for the most part.

You can post as much of my history as you like. There's nothing in it that I'm embarrassed by -- which is more than you can probably say for your last hour's contribution. It's still shocking to me how low the level of knowledge on here is. I mean, over in C&V, there are people who can identify the precise year and factory of a seventy year-old derailleur, which is cool, but most people don't understand how tires or bicycle frames work ( or the people that do, have learned to be quiet, to avoid being harassed by the vocal ignorant members, which I consider likely ), and I did not expect that.

shelbyfv

And that's a wrap.

TC1

I mean, you posted the evidence of that just a few moments ago. Didn't you read it?

MaxKatt

I hear ya. Used to live on Upper West, now in burbs. Was in last week to visit a friend at Mt. Sinai West Hospital and ate a slice in a car parked on 10th Ave for about half an hour around 6:30pm when a lot of people order take-out. OMG! Was absolutely astounded by the never ending stream of delivery e-bikes speeding north up the hill next to me. I was thinking I wouldn't feel comfortable riding in ebike traffic of that volume and speed...all with big square insulated boxes mounted on their backs/bikes.

In good news...most had lights on. Sadly, a few made the return trip on the sidewalk.

PeteHski

You are not wrong and in fact I stopped road riding for over a decade and just did mountain biking exclusively. I eventually came back to road riding, but I’ve had a few close shaves over the last few years and seriously considering going back full time to mtb and gravel. Whatever the self-appointed expert says it is definitely safer off-road here if you are a half competent rider.

PeteHski

That’s the problem when you have no self-awareness. But at least it provides some entertainment for these dark winter nights.

PeteHski

I do exactly that over the winter months and quite a lot over the summer too. I keep my TED on the local roads to a minimum.

TC1

Find and cite one error. I'm very aware of what I post, and unlike many, I research before I write, exactly so I do not wind up embarrassed later. A habit you may want to adopt, or at least consider, given some of your recent entries here.

If you find cyclists lobbying for waste and against cycling safety entertaining, then you are sicker than I would've suspected.

Also, if I'd written that sentence, someone would accuse me of not being a cyclist. Maybe you should get out and ride. It's dark and 19* Fahrenheit here right now, and I'm just headed out to the grocery store.

TC1

You are mistaking my opinion -- which is irrelevant -- with data -- which is not. None of the data we have supports your claim, and in fact, the evidence directly refutes it. Can you offer an explanation for that phenomenon? Ironically, the situation is actually that you are the "self-appointed expert" who is insisting that their opinion trumps all of the objective research on the topic -- all while calling other people's self-awareness into question.

big john

Why are you doing this? What motivates you to keep coming back?

Chuck M 

This is all that needed said.

TC1

I care about cycling safety -- and it horrifies to me to see that a forum allegedly full of cyclists appears to be almost totally uninformed on the topic. And it horrifies me to see cyclists lobbying for the continued waste of time, money, and lives on dedicated infrastructure construction that has been proven over decades to be completely ineffective at saving lives.

Maybe I am John Lennon reincarnated, but I can imagine a world where we can just hop on our bikes and ride -- wherever we want, across the neighborhood, across the city, or across the country. Wasting money on a few bike paths here and there does not push us further to that goal -- in fact, it is counterproductive to that goal, because it reinforces the idea among drivers that cyclists do not belong on the road -- and at some point, we are going to have to address the root cause of the problem, which is road user behavior.

Why not start now, instead of continuing to waste time, money, and lives on strategies that we know do not work?

TC1

No, we still have to the problem of all the data -- all of which agrees with my opinion ( which is not a coincidence, because unlike many here, I study the data and then form an opinion, not vice versa ). Try it, it makes it wildly easier to wind up being correct.

DangerousDanR

Mrs. Dan and I have toured quite a bit in the wild country to the north. We have ridden the length of the Outer Hebrides three times, toured Skye twice, and ridden on Shetland. For the most part we found drivers in the Highlands and Islands to be downright friendly, with a few very notable exceptions.

We actually got run off the road by a young man driving a black BMW M3, but I have always attributed his behavior to being a young man driving a black BMW M3. We had one delivery driver on Skye whom we would pass every day, always going the opposite direction, and he would wave to us. On what was obviously our last day on Skye when he passed us that day he gave us a really big wave and gave us a lights salute.

That said, there is no way in HELL I would ride in Glasgow again. So for us, the narrow rural roads, with one serious exception, were just plain wonderful, but the urban environment... not so much. Somewhat the same as I find here in Fargo.

Our experience riding in France was somewhat similar. Unless Paris is a whole lot better since 2019, I will not ride there again. Rural France was wonderful, as were all of the smaller cities we visited. I have read that French law assumes that in the event of a bicycle / auto collision the auto driver is presumed to be at fault, and that the penalty will include loss of driving privileges for a significant period of time.

I don't actually know if TC1 is correct or not. He is pointing to absolute death and injury numbers, while his opponents are pointing to statistical measures of death and injury per mile traveled. It all boils down to weather or not the mileage estimates are accurate. I suspect that they are, but there is an uncertainty window there.

But any time you have an intersection between a protected bicycle lane and automobile traffic you have a danger zone. With the exception of the trail along the river here, all of the bicycle lanes have a lot of car road crossings. And automobile drivers just don't watch where they are going.

I think that TC1 is advocating for assumed liability on the automobile driver combined with strict penalties as the ultimate safety system. I have little doubt that it would be a huge help. I also see it having the chance of a snowball in Hell of becoming the law of the land in the US. We have a lot of drivers with multiple DUI convictions and the penalty here in North Dakota seems to be "sod all."

My former state of residence made the third DUI in 5 years a felony, so at least it gave drunk drivers some time in prison to maybe get a little bit sober. It also results in a lifetime loss of driving privileges. North Dakota makes the fourth DUI in seven years a felony with 1 year in prison. In Minnesota, they get a special plate that is white and starts with the letter "W" so they are know as Whiskey plates.

Alan K

Unfortunately, it’s not the voting public whose wishes our politicians are following. Once they get elected, they follow their own agenda (well, the agenda of those who bought them off). Bottom line is that they are not behaving as public servants. And your observations about deterioration in our nations structure of society are not inaccurate.

TC1

I appreciate that you are at least willing to consider the question, instead of resorting to insults and blocks, like many here. That's a start. That said, your second sentence is a little inaccurate -- I am happy to use incident-per-distance statistics when available. The problem is, such data is rarely available, and even less often accurate. And very unfortunately, some of the citations referenced -- particularly those by John Flores -- were authored by individuals who were either not competent or not honest, because they used wildly inaccurate numbers both above and below their vinculum. One of my professions is data science, so I am constitutionally unable to let garbage like that slide.

Not necessarily. I am fine with apportioning blame accurately, and while this will not be a popular opinion here ( as if that has stopped me before ) it is fact that many cyclists do not ride safely, and cause their own crashes. Not all of them, certainly, but some. And I cannot say that I am a fan of the idea of throwing a driver in prison because a cyclist was salmoning in the dark with no lights.

This is much more the crux of my argument. It is presently effectively legal in most of the United States to kill a person, as long as they are on a bicycle, and only slightly less-legal to kill pedestrians. That situation does not comport with any of our laws, nor our culture, and it is entirely the fault of our AWOL law enforcement.

Also, the standard of vehicle operator training is an embarrassment. It is simply not that difficult to teach and learn basic operational skills, and yet we fail both to do so, and to require a reasonable standard of training. Most drivers do not even know how to brake properly, never mind steer, and forget about them handling an emergency situation.

As I noted somewhere else -- possibly in another thread -- it is easier to pass laws than you might think, at least in some municipalities. The hard part is getting indolent cops and prosecutors off their derrieres to enforce those laws. For example, in Illinois ( and some other states, like Florida ), we have actually passed perfectly good laws that criminalize hit-and-run offenses with severe penalties -- up to 15 years in prison, if the crash resulted in a fatality, in Illinois. However, this does no good whatsoever, because the arrest rate -- not conviction, just the perpetrators the cops could even be bothered to find -- is well under 1%. And compounding that problem, even on occasions when the cops can be bothered to arrest killer drivers, often the district attorney refuses to do their job, and declines to even press a charge.

As I've said repeatedly, it does not matter which laws we pass, and it does not matter how much concrete and paint we pour, as long as road users can kill and main each other without repercussion.

So, we can start to address the actual problems, or we can continue to prattle on begging for ineffectual construction. Our choice, and I remain mystified why so many here would choose the latter.

PeteHski

I have actually ridden bikes around here both on and off road for several decades. So I have a better understanding of my own personal cycling risks than you or any general accident stats. Our local rural roads have the highest rate of fatalities for both cyclists and motorists alike. If you actually rode here you would understand why.

Since you appear to be so interested in MK Redways, here is the future development plan for them, which I am sure you will strongly disapprove of. But I would much rather cycle around MK than any of the neighbouring towns.

https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/sit...P%20Report.pdf

TC1

The exact opposite case appears in the only data seen here so far, as previously discussed.

Wishful thinking is not a strategy, it is what one resorts to when their strategy fails.