On Jul 23, 1:28 am, (Tom Keats) wrote:
In article ,
ComandanteBanana writes:

Not that you can do much about it other than building BIKE FACILITIES
(bike lanes and bike paths), or letting cyclists TAKE THE LANE, but at
least you know the bone of contention is COMPETITION.

Skilled riders don't compete with drivers, they cooperate with the
reasonable, rational & sociable majority of them, while letting
the impatient ones get ahead, and getting ahead of (or otherwise
avoiding) the indecisive, screwy ones who don't know where they
want to go.
snip

Until I was assaulted with a motor vehicle because I was riding my
bicycle on the street I would have agreed with you, but there are
drivers (thankfully a very small percentage) that think any bike on
the road is wasted space, that anything (including drivers in other
cars) that slows them down or even makes them change lanes is
"impeding traffic" (they are the only "traffic" that counts). Let's
say that that number is .01%, or 1 in 10,000. That may be high or it
may be low, but until they start giving psych exams to drivers we just
have to guess as to how high the number of sociopaths and psychotics
with licenses is. I ride in a densely auto populated urban area, the D/
FW Metroplex, and I estimate that there are times when I get passed as
much as 2,000 times an hour. That's another SWAG, as I'm too busy
trying not to be killed by the people on the bottom end of the bell
curve in driving skills to count everyone else. So using those
assumptions you would expect to face a psycho- or sociopath about once
in 5 hours of cycling in heavy traffic. The good part is that cycling
in heavy traffic actually prevents the nutjobs from hitting you, the
bad part is every once in a while they catch you on a deserted road,
like what happened to me in 2001.

As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, the most common threats are
drivers who can't drive, in spite of having a license. Even without
cell phones or in-car entertainment systems they pay little attention
to the road or much else outside the car. Usually these drivers won't
ram you from behind so much as mis-judge passing clearances and clip
you with a mirror or door handle. The psychos and sociopaths want to
kill you for existing in their world, but these guys just don't care
unless they hit you, and then they're isoo sorry/i that you are
injured... Now if we could just Do Something about those 2 groups we
could reduce the cyclist injury and death toll by 2/3. Unfortunately
by removing the dense drivers from the drivers group you move them to
the cyclist group where they stink up our statistics by getting run
over because they don't pay any more attention on a bike than they did
in a car, but at least this is a self-limiting phenomenon, even more
so if they get killed before they can breed. Being dense and
inattentive in a car raises your insurance rates, the same behavior on
a bicycle takes you out of the gene pool.