On Saturday, September 8, 2018 at 9:24:33 PM UTC+1, Oculus Lights wrote:
Been thinking about this for the past few weeks. My observations are consistent from day to day enough to see that one day of watching bicyclists nearly getting killed by car drivers was not a freak occurrence.
A new job has me driving to work, 8.5 miles, 20 tp 45 minutes.
Some of you in Silicon Valley know the main roads, Lawrence and Central Expressways.
I see some of the same bike commuters on the bike lanes a day or more every week.
But....
cars can be zipping by the bike lane at 50mph
cars can be creeping along with keeping aware of a possibly biker alongside or crossing a side street where they're about to turn onto or or off of depending on which shortcut their cellphone mapping is telling them to take, all to save one or two minutes of time... and phone calling and not even being able to break away from other driving distractions long enough to keep their eyes fully on the road.
There are some corners and merges where I see at least one close call a week between inattentive and arrogant drivers with a bicyclist. telling me that if I biked to work a few days a week, that eventually the odds could hit, and so would I be.
So here it is, the case for more road construction!!!!! Because a smooth steady homogenous traffic flow is the safest for car drivers and bicyclists alike.
Also the case to get rid of these moronic commuter lanes, placed in the right hand turning lane on local expressways, only serving to aggravate drivers and make them even less attentive of bicyclists because half the commuter lane traffic is scofflaws in the commuter lane afraid of that motorcycle cop blocking the bike lane in order to write nuisance tickets for driving in the bike lane instead of real traffic violations that lead to the crashes that cause my 8 mile commute to take up to an hour instead of the typical 30 minutes.
The mornings GMaps tell me to go all the way to the 101, I may as well call in late for work the moment that comes up on my phone before I leave the house to go to work.
No easy solution.
Living within easy reach of Caltrain would be great, but needing to bike 6 miles to a station that then runs local to Mountain View increases the door to door commute to over an hour.
No viable solution here until viable light rail gets built that actually runs across the peninsula instead of the north south routes that are all that currently exist.
Kinda sucks, and yes, even hardcore like me, can end up too scared to bike commute, yes, me too.

Now just wait for the outraged cries of "Danger, danger!" from the Krygowski Klowns. You're not supposed to mention the obvious fact that high speed-differentials between cars and bikes are fraught with danger.

Andre Jute
The man who proved that cycling is safer than even the Klowns think