Scofflaw Cyclists in Boston

On Oct 20, 7:00 pm, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Oct 20, 2:09 pm, Opus wrote:



On Oct 19, 11:23 pm, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On Oct 19, 7:41 pm, bjw wrote:

IMO, the cagers hate us because we are there,
and because cyclists using the roads are not
considered part of our society's norm.

Oh come on. The cagers don't hate you. Or more accurately, if any do
hate you, it's only a tiny percentage, and those hate lots of types of
people.

I'm amazed by the paranoia some people express. Hell, one of my best
friends is a slight woman in her mid-60s who rides almost every day,
almost always solo. She's not afraid of motorists, and she doesn't
perceive any particular hate. Why do you???

- Frank Krygowski

As has been pointed out many times before, if only 1% of drivers want
to kill you, that's an average of 1 death threat a day...

And if pigs had wings, they could fly. But neither is close to being
true.

If 1% of drivers wanted to kill you, you'd be dead. Because by now,
one of them would have succeeded. Give up the paranoia and fear
mongering.


While it's true that - in my experience* - essentially all drivers
around here seem to retain that shred of sanity that keeps them from
actually trying to kill me, way too many of them can and do
deliberately make trouble for me, and they don't need any wild antics
on my part to set them off (though I've no doubt that *helps* some of
them over the threshold :-). I keep getting better at just letting it
go, but it's not nice, and it's obviously misdirected hostility.

(* I would add that my experience does not include much riding in the
kind of places where I hear people *do* actually flip their lid and
deliberately ram their motor vehicles into people riding bikes.
*Could* happen anywhere, I guess, but doesn't seem likely around
here.)

BTW, many (most?) people tend to regard me differently in most any
circumstance than they would, say, a slight woman in her 60's - or
even, say, some clean-cut scholarly looking fellow. I seem to fit the
target profile for vented hostility much better. Just the way it is.

"James" wrote in message
...
[...]
We felt in peril yesterday evening. It was still daylight and we (two
of us) were cycling along at a reasonable clip, about 45km/h, when a
cager just passed and then braked, indicated and turned left all at
once right in front of us.

We both had to take evasive action. Brake, look behind and swing
right over tram tracks to avoid the left turning vehicle in front. We
both had words to say. I yelled "A--hole!". The cager stopped and
hurled a load back. We continued on our way, had a nice coffee and
returned home - SNAFU.

I believe every cyclist has had exactly that same experience. It is not
common, but it is not rare either. The only thing to do is to learn from it
and to ride defensively just as you should drive your motor vehicle
defensively. If someone is following me and we are approaching an
intersection, I am ready if he wants to pass and then turn right in front of
me. People who do that are not brain dead, they are signaling that you have
irritated them by slowing them down.

Regards,

Ed Dolan the Great - Minnesota
aka
Saint Edward the Great - Order of the Perpetual Sorrows - Minnesota

In article
,
bjw wrote:

On Oct 19, 12:51Â*pm, Jay Beattie wrote:
On Oct 19, 12:15Â*pm, bjw wrote:
On Oct 19, 11:23Â*am, Peter Cole wrote:

On 10/19/2010 2:13 PM, Tom Sherman °_° wrote:

The cite infers that liberals are less apt to put
a moral spin on something like disobeying traffic laws if they feel that
behavior doesn't present harm or unfairness.

Scofflaw cyclists *do* present harm and unfairness.

How?

Every time a bike messenger slips between two
nearly-stopped cars to make a turn, God kills
a kitten.

Won't someone please think of the kittens?!

Well actually, they can hurt themselves and others -- including me.
Some of these antics push traffic my way, or the messenger ends up
cutting me off. Â*It is like I am riding in the middle of a Â*cattle
drive and some asswipe on a bike swoops down and scares the cows.
Don't scare the f****** cows! I also would prefer not to deal with
drivers who are enraged by messengers. Â*Yes, drivers should stay calm,
but they don't. Â*The cows can get really mad. -- Jay Beattie.

IMO, the cagers hate us because we are there,
and because cyclists using the roads are not
considered part of our society's norm.
Bad behavior by messengers is just an excuse.

I don't like being around it - here, I have more of a
problem with undergrads running stop signs
(on bikes) and shooting out from cross streets
or paths without looking, which I also don't like.
But I don't think failure-to-enforce on bicyclists is
a significant contributor to driver-bicycle tensions.
I think if you sent out cops to rigidly enforce traffic
laws on bicyclists, the main effect you'd see would
be casual commuters giving up cycling after their
first expensive ticket for rolling a stop sign.

Honestly I was expecting that video to be more
extreme, from Tom's reaction and some of the
other posts.

Rolling a stop sign on a bicycle is not itself worth a
citation. On a bicycle I typically approach the SS at
less than 15 mph so I have been scanning the cross
street longer than a car that approaches it at 25 mph
and slows abruptly. Also I do not have a hood in front
of me. I am circumspect around police, naturally.

--
Michael Press

I have a used bike shop in Cambridge, Ma, right next door to Boston,
and I can say the cops here _do_ write tickets for cyclists.
Running stop signs, not stopping for crosswalks, improper lighting.
I hear about it all the time.

Vin - Menotomy Vintage Bicycles
http://OldRoads.com

On 10/21/2010 7:20 AM, OldRoads wrote:
I have a used bike shop in Cambridge, Ma, right next door to Boston,
and I can say the cops here _do_ write tickets for cyclists.
Running stop signs, not stopping for crosswalks, improper lighting.
I hear about it all the time.

Vin - Menotomy Vintage Bicycles
http://OldRoads.com



Yep, that's because the Cambridge Bike Committee asked for it.

On Oct 21, 4:14*am, Michael Press wrote:
In article
,



*bjw wrote:
On Oct 19, 12:51*pm, Jay Beattie wrote:
On Oct 19, 12:15*pm, bjw wrote:
On Oct 19, 11:23*am, Peter Cole wrote:

On 10/19/2010 2:13 PM, Tom Sherman °_° wrote:

The cite infers that liberals are less apt to put
a moral spin on something like disobeying traffic laws if they feel that
behavior doesn't present harm or unfairness.

Scofflaw cyclists *do* present harm and unfairness.

How?

Every time a bike messenger slips between two
nearly-stopped cars to make a turn, God kills
a kitten.

Won't someone please think of the kittens?!

Well actually, they can hurt themselves and others -- including me.
Some of these antics push traffic my way, or the messenger ends up
cutting me off. *It is like I am riding in the middle of a *cattle
drive and some asswipe on a bike swoops down and scares the cows.
Don't scare the f****** cows! I also would prefer not to deal with
drivers who are enraged by messengers. *Yes, drivers should stay calm,
but they don't. *The cows can get really mad. -- Jay Beattie.

IMO, the cagers hate us because we are there,
and because cyclists using the roads are not
considered part of our society's norm.
Bad behavior by messengers is just an excuse.

I don't like being around it - here, I have more of a
problem with undergrads running stop signs
(on bikes) and shooting out from cross streets
or paths without looking, which I also don't like.
But I don't think failure-to-enforce on bicyclists is
a significant contributor to driver-bicycle tensions.
I think if you sent out cops to rigidly enforce traffic
laws on bicyclists, the main effect you'd see would
be casual commuters giving up cycling after their
first expensive ticket for rolling a stop sign.

Honestly I was expecting that video to be more
extreme, from Tom's reaction and some of the
other posts.

Rolling a stop sign on a bicycle is not itself worth a
citation. On a bicycle I typically approach the SS at
less than 15 mph so I have been scanning the cross
street longer than a car that approaches it at 25 mph
and slows abruptly. Also I do not have a hood in front
of me. I am circumspect around police, naturally.

The hood is a good point. Visibility from a bike is much better.

When I took the motorcycle license test a few decades ago, I noted
that one question on the written test was to pick out the safety
_advantage_ that a motorcyclists had over a car driver. The answer
was visibility. Certainly, when your vehicle doesn't have obstructing
windshield pillars and a six foot nose, you can see better in many
situations.

- Frank Krygowski

On Oct 21, 11:54*am, Peter Cole wrote:
On 10/21/2010 7:20 AM, OldRoads wrote:

I have a used bike shop in Cambridge, Ma, right next door to Boston,
and I can say the cops here _do_ write tickets for cyclists.
Running stop signs, not stopping for crosswalks, improper lighting.
I hear about it all the time.

Vin - Menotomy Vintage Bicycles
http://OldRoads.com

Yep, that's because the Cambridge Bike Committee asked for it.

Fine by me. Especially the lighting bit.

- Frank Krygowski

On 10/20/2010 4:54 PM, bjw wrote:

Good points snipped for brevity...

I know you want to argue that cycling is safe, and I agree
with you. It is safe. But that does not change my opinion
that cagers would rather you weren't on the road. Again,
being a cager is an attitude, not a permanent identity.

In locales with congested narrow roads and a relatively small number of
cyclists, "getting in the way" is a real problem. I've done it for many
years, and not learned to like it any better. It's not so much the
danger as the knowledge that you're inconveniencing lots of people. If
there's a way to safely reallocate the existing road space to reduce
that inconvenience, I'm all for it.

As the article I cited earlier attempted to calculate, there's a real
cost associated with creating an impediment to traffic flow. It's not
fair to expect the motoring majority to bear excessive costs generated
by a cycling minority. Lanes that are too narrow to share must be
"taken" by cyclists for safety. There's usually a cost to that.
Vehicular cycling makes no attempt (unlike the article writer) to
analyze those costs. You can be legally right, but economically wrong.

On Oct 20, 9:00*pm, Frank Krygowski wrote:
snip
As has been pointed out many times before, if only 1% of drivers want
to kill you, that's an average of 1 death threat a day...

And if pigs had wings, they could fly. *But neither is close to being
true.

If 1% of drivers wanted to kill you, you'd be dead. *Because by now,
one of them would have succeeded. *Give up the paranoia and fear
mongering.

- Frank Krygowski

Been there, done that, didn't like the neighborhood, so I came back.
Notice I posted "death threats" or people threatening to kill you. As
I said I got those about once a day when I commuted, down to about
once a week now, but like everything else it isn't consistent. I can
go for weeks without anybody bothering me and then get 2 threats in
one trip, like last Sunday on the way to church.

But I was killed once, and brought back. Like I said I didn't like the
neighborhood. I mentioned the story before in this group, but it ended
up with me flying through the air some 12-16 feet up after getting hit
somewhere between 45 and 65 MPH with the higher end of the range being
more probable than the lower.

On 10/21/2010 10:54 AM, Peter Cole wrote:
On 10/21/2010 7:20 AM, OldRoads wrote:
I have a used bike shop in Cambridge, Ma, right next door to Boston,
and I can say the cops here _do_ write tickets for cyclists.
Running stop signs, not stopping for crosswalks, improper lighting.
I hear about it all the time.

Vin - Menotomy Vintage Bicycles
http://OldRoads.com



Yep, that's because the Cambridge Bike Committee asked for it.

Bravo for them!

--
Tom Sherman - 42.435731,-83.985007
I am a vehicular cyclist.