On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 8:55:35 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:

I wouldn't assign ulterior motives to people who feel very uncomfortable riding around traffic.

+1. There are some roads that are objectively dangerous to ride on. We have several such going out of town. On the worst of these dangerous roads, there are trucks thundering along this narrow country road in both directions at maximum permitted speed, and a hard shoulder 12in wide at best, disappearing totally in some places. I've been on it, and it's an unpleasant ride with trucks thundering 18in max from your shoulders. You can't take the lane either, because there won't be enough space for the truck behind you to slow to your speed, and he can't pass you in the opposite lane because trucks are thundering towards him in that lane. I refused to ride on it with the police superintendent for this area, and a while later he was killed cycling on that road. Think on it: who should know the safe roads better than the police superintendent?

There are some places it simply isn't smart to ride a bicycle. Morons like Krygowski screeching "Danger! Danger!" and "Take the lane!" don't help; instead they leave the impression that cyclists are a bunch of reckless idiots antisocially endangering other people's lives by their insistence on riding where the speed differential is simply too large and the traffic too heavy and the sightlines for drivers too short.

In any event, cyclists always have other choices, recreational cyclists admittedly more than commuters. A bus driver spoke to me at the supermarket about a four-seasons commuter on one of his routes, a very narrow twisty road with many unsighted corners, asking me to speak to the fellow about the danger. I did, and he said, "I'm on that road because all the bus drivers and motor commuters know me and look out for me. The only alternative is the main drag to the city--" he watched me shudder "--and the road past the airport." That bit left me speechless, not a common occurrence. I've been on both the roads he rejected, and the only safe way to go on them is in huge convoys of cycles, as on for instance charity rides, with several big SUVs spaced out behind to break the speed of the normal motor traffic. On one such ride I joined, the organisers thought five ambulances necessary, and I couldn't help wondering what Franki-boy would say to them. I also heard insurance was hell to get, with some insurers simply refusing even to quote.

The small country road the town's premier bicycle-commuter considers "safer", we cross and recross on many small country lane rides. At one point on an otherwise really good workout ride in pretty surroundings on smooth roads with almost zero traffic, you need to ride for a couple of hundred yards on it, and somebody never fails to have a tense moment with a car or a truck on it even in those couple of hundred yards because we enter just after a blind corner, and the cars are travelling at a speed that makes it difficult for them to slow to our speed, and there's no shoulder so perforce we're in the lane, or already in the middle of the road because we want to turn across the oncoming traffic (coming around another unsighted corner; some who're otherwise keen just won't ride with us if the route will take us onto that road. At several times of the day, even just crossing that road, what with its many blind hills and blind corners, on the country lanes that cross it, can take ten minutes before there's a break in the traffic long enough to cross.

There's another ride, on an even smaller country road, but fast and wide-sweeping so that cars can see you a long way off and slow appropriately, which requires one to be on the dangerous road (the one the admirable commuter prefers to even more dangerous roads) only for about fifty yards before one of our small lanes turns off it, but we go there only on Sundays when everyone else is in church (this is a Catholic country, still) because those 50 yards lie between two black spots (a black spot is the scene of regular automobile accidents, because the road is intrinsically dangerous, and the road authorities put up warning boards with a black spot on them).

It may sound like I'd better ride intervals around my orchard, but in fact the majority of miles around here are on small, safe lanes**, all of them tarmac-topped. Since we're recreational riders, we don't mind mapping routes that keep us off the six dangerous roads out of town*. It's not worth the stress of going on them. I ran into an old pedalpal with whom I'd lost contact and he reminisced about how thirty years ago we used to go on three of those six roads (the other three were already too dangerous) after dinner in the summer, returning at about midnight when it was pitch dark, with only the inadequate bicycle lamps of the period, because there was almost no traffic and what there was proceeded at a reasonable speed, about half the rate they drive at today; he went out on one of those roads in broad daylight the other day and in less than three miles experienced so many close passes of trucks and cars that he turned off the main road and continued on the lanes. He said, "I'm cycling for my heart. Man, I was praying for Baxter's Bridge to come up so I could get the **** out of that Death Rally. I don't need that stress." I understand how he feels. A favourite downhill ride of mine ends on that road only a few hundred yards from town, but rather than ride on that road, I turn around and slog back up the hill and go home the long, hard but stressless way (or at least, via my HRM, in control of the stress).

The point I'm trying to make is that if you choose your routes well, the usual amount of common sense and alertness an adult should possess will keep you safe and make your rides a joy rather than a chore. There is no need to force your way in where you're not wanted by people going about their business at speeds you cannot and don't want to achieve.

Andre Jute
Some places "taking the lane" is a suicide note

*Beside one of which a few years ago a wooden cross was planted in memory of one "John Forester". It's a road on part of which cyclists who want to live "take the ditch", which is three feet wide, only a foot deep, and paved, quite pleasant really in dry weather. Makes one wonder whether the memorial is for that John Forester.

**Doesn't mean you don't need to take care; you had better: a schoolboy was killed on his bike on one of my favourite downhills when at the bottom of the hill he met an oncoming car whose driver never saw him around the curve until it was far too late.