RB1-luvr

only in the two northern corners can you cycle in relative peace in CT. The people in those areas are much more chill.

GhostRider62

In my limited experience, Connecticutians hate thruhikers a little more than they hate cyclists.

WRT to traffic lights, none of mine will trigger for a cyclist. Somehow they are also timed by the cars going thru. What this means is if it is just one car, I will be halfway across the highway and the F'n light will change. So, I always hit the pedestrian crosswalk button. That gives me about 30 seconds.

One of my strategies for decades has been to ride in rural areas with horse farms, have a good lawyer, and wave to everybody. I cannot remember the last issue I had locally.

genec

Nice path... strange person.

genec

One neighborhood I lived in in San Diego was all closed in except for two streets out. Going west, the traffic light had a detector in the ground that I could never trigger... even motorcycles could not trigger it... I had to "push the button" every time. I even talked to motorcyclists waiting at the same light... their comments agreed with me, it was a PITA.

The other direction, going N/S had a camera triggered light... it worked perfectly if I wore some contrasting clothing. (nothing dark). I usually wore bright clothing on my commutes, so this worked quite well. Knowing the other light was a dud, I often went north before going west... just to avoid that failed detector.

The contrast between the working and non-working lights just a block or two apart was quite interesting. No matter how many times I reported the non-functioning light, it was never "fixed."

Gyro

In my neck of the woods, motorcycles won't trigger lights to change. Forget about cyclists doing it.

work4bike

In my area, you can see the cutout in the road where the sensors are located, as long as you ride on top any one of those lines, the light will be triggered. The only problem is that some of them cause my computer to max out in speed display. I hate that.

fooferdoggie 

ya it was one of the stranger things. I am used to people in cars yelling at me.

mdarnton

I've been trying to ride more carefully and spent some time on YouTube watching accident clips just to see what were the most common problems to watch out for. One of the top causes was people completely running lights, fast. Today driving (car) home someone blew right through a left turn solid (not flashing) red arrow just as I hit the intersection from the other side. I see run reds all the time on my commute, sometimes just barely red, but often enough as today, through a red that's been there a while (I saw someone run this same one yesterday on my bike, too).

Then also coming home, three blocks later, the car ahead of me suddenly stopped cold on a green.

The thing I learned from watching videos is that as much as you think it would be hard to mess up in obvious situations, people WILL find a way. Add to that the rampant hostility that has been brought to the surface recently, quite a few people seem to have gone over the edge. Drive/ride carefully.

JW Fas

The moment you think you've idiot-proofed something, somebody invents a better idiot.

JoeyBike

Imagine you bike to work every day and motor vehicles were hogging the bike lane doing 3 mph (and it was totally legal) while you are capable of doing 18 mph on your bike. Might that get frustrating?

Put yourself in the other guy's shoes. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you should do it. If you're cool with slowing down traffic for your "hobby" (as motorists see you) then why should the other guy have to suffer courtesy? No excuse for violence tho.

Gear_Admiral 

Sounds nicer than Miami, St. Augustine, Tampa, and Gainesville, and Ocala. Never spent time in Jax.

On second point, hard disagree. You cannot win with some people. Some people would roll coal on you when you're just walking on a separate sidewalk.

jon c. 

Rarely encounter hostile drivers in Tallahassee. Although I live and mostly ride outside the city on low traffic roads.

JW Fas

The problem with your attempt to elicit empathy is that it's not grounded in reality. Putting yourself in another person's shoes only means something when you're dealing with how the world actually works. It's not legal for a motor vehicle to putter along in the bike lane, so trying to put oneself in another person's shoes elicits a false result based on a false premise.

Daniel4

Firstly, that motor vehicle already has his lane and had it for about 100 years. So there's no reason or excuse for the driver to say he had nowhere else to drive on.

Secondly, if that motor vehicle were hogging the bike lane, then that's the reason for the cyclist to go into the car lane as he would already do as there are so many motor vehicles parked there. Cars in the bike lane are the reason cyclists ride in the car lane. Not the other way around.

JoeyBike

Well, when parables don't work (I'm not as good as Jesus at those stories anyway) I should type in plain English.

The title of this thread is "Hate towards cyclists", as if that's some big mystery. Motorists HATE us because we are often "in their way" and impeding their "god-given" right to unimpeded travel.

There are other reasons motorists have CONTEMPT for us. Some of us wear laughably funny clothes like a goofy cult. Some of us are truly rude and unnecessarily "in the way". Some of us act like "Share The Road" only applies to other road users. Some of us blatantly disobey traffic laws. And some of us look like we're having too much fun getting to where we're going.

Bottom line: Cyclists often impede motorist travel. Plain and simple. That's why they hate us.

SurferRosa

Damn. I really miss the '80s.

SurferRosa

Was he really that "good"? A few of those still don't make a lick of sense. The parable of the many murders? The parable of the unpopular banquet?

JoeyBike

I think you had to be there. Working the crowd and watching their reactions.

tungsten

That is f*cked up!

Daniel4

That's the same kind of logic that makes school zones so dangerous because parents drive their kids to school for their safety.

livedarklions

Utter horsecrap, especially the assertions that you have bolded. Motorists view cyclists as being "in their way" precisely because they view the road as "their way", while cyclists are considered interlopers. And my understanding is you rarely drive--if you actually drove an appreciable amount, you'd almost certainly notice that impeded traffic is almost never the result of cyclists, but is the result of trying to get too many cars through various arteries, fender benders, motorists needing to wait for an opening to turn left, and any number of reasons only involving motorized vehicles.

Bottom line: Cyclists rarely impede motorist travel. Plain and simple. Motorists' prejudice against the use of roads by cyclists causes them to view any reduction to the speed limit or slightly under as being an "impediment" and confirmation bias causes them to remember each such incident vividly while basically ignoring and/or forgetting the vastly higher number of times they were :"impeded" by the actions of other motorists. You want to make causal claims about the hostility of drivers? The burden of proof is on you to prove it. Mere assertion is just that.

Amitoj

Can't agree more.
This "impeding traffic" thing is so overblown that no one stops to see if it makes any sense. Instead the rider is blamed for riding in a place that is "not safe" and is asked to seek alternate routes. I was out riding one morning with my new action camera mounted on the handlebar and captured this close call. I posted this on a local Facebook community page to show how not to overtake a bicyclist. I got blamed by a large number of people for being there, even when it was clear that the driver was in violation of the 3 feet law. Serves me right for posting this on facebook and expecting sane responses, LOL. Anyway, I didn't like it but what finally shut them all up was that asking a rider to ride somewhere else that is "safe" is somewhat like asking women to not venture out alone after dark, or not go to places that may not be safe. Maybe it was too much for me to expect that people understand that it is not the roads that are dangerous, it is the reckless drivers on those roads that make them dangerous.
In the end, I reached out to the local Police Department and shared this video with them. They were able to track down the driver and make them aware of the mistake they made.

JW Fas

Three-foot law or not, no one should ever overtake another vehicle when going around a blind turn or uphill. This was both.
Personally, I position myself towards the center line when biking around a right-hand turn, because that makes me most visible to overtaking and oncoming traffic. It also prevents unsafe passing. Around a left-hand turn I position myself in the center of the lane to maximize visibility and keep me from edge riding.

Amitoj

Very true about bad overtaking and lane positioning. This happened around 7:40 on a Saturday morning and there was really no traffic on the road other than these 3 vehicles you see in the video. Plus this was on a 12% grade so I was slow. All this made me think that waiting a couple of seconds would not be that big a deal for drivers. Heh. Obviously I was wrong.

rydabent

This unfortunately is the product of the ME generation that dont think of other people's rights.