trombone

I ride to work each day through the city centre. It's a 10km one-way trip, which I ride on an old 1980's road bike with mainly upgraded bits. I ride fairly fast, but I obey all the traffic signals, including stopping at red lights on quiet intersections. (A lot of cyclists jump red lights in Sydney.)

I ride in the traffic, taking a whole lane. I'm generally going as fast as the traffic flow in any case. At lights I'll often ride to the head of the queue and plonk myself in front of the cars - I feel safer in front than in the queue. I know the phasing of the lights on my route rather well now, as well as where to see strategic reflections from buildings and billboards of the opposing lights that mean I can tell when 'my' light is about to go green, and be moving and clipped in ready to pull away fast - well ahead of the reactions of the drivers. Again, I feel safer in front, and very rarely get any aggro from drivers doing this. I try to always signal prior to turning / changing lane if there is traffic around.

There are some hopeless 'painted on the road' style bike lanes on some parts of the roads - I ignore them, as they are lethal. Usually they are rather pot-holed, and in several cases run adjacent to the line pf parked cars. How road designers think drawing a cycle lane right in the door zone is a good idea I'll never know. On those roads I actually ride even further out in the lane than normal, just to make sure motorists get the message that I'm not going to move over into the 'bike lane' if they try to overtake when it's not clear the other direction. Luckily those streets are usually the quieter ones. (There's actually quite a few cycle lanes like that in Sydney, and the RTA produce a map showing 'safe cycle routes in Sydney' with them all marked on the map. I assume the map is called this as you can then avoid riding these routes and therefore be safer...!)

Some of the route is on shared cycle / walk ways. The busiest of these are the least pleasant areas to ride, and where I get the most abuse, especially on Thurs / Fri evenings when there are a lot of people out in the city. Pedestrians are very unpredictable, and tend to do sudden side-steps and about-turns without looking! I don't ride fast on these sections, and give way to pedestrians.

I wear a helmet (it is mandatory in most of Australia), and a reflective sash. At night I also put reflective bands around my ankles (very effective BTW), and I have lights (my homeward commute is pretty much always in the dark in winter).