Quote Originally Posted by yellow
I was surprised at the statistic that 70% of bicycle-related accidents are the fault of cyclists.
Have you gals noticed that whenever there is a bike accident, cyclist killed, and no witness, it's always the cyclist that swerved into the car lane or appeared out of nowhere?

Also please notice that it doesn't say that 70% of the cyclists were responsible for the accidents: they say that 70% of the cyclists had violated a traffic rule, and 45% of the motorists had violated the traffic rule. So there is at least shared responsibility on a great number of accidents. Moreover, a motorist can be violating no traffic rule by opening his car door after "looking" (yeah right), but may still cause a cyclist to crash quite heavily. When there's no context provided, I tend to have little trust of bike-car accident stats provided by the police....

However, it's true that countless numbers of cyclists are acting stupidly on their bike, recreational and non-recreational. I think the "think and act like a vehicle" is the most important rule.