living with cars on the road

[Grog]

In regards to motorcycles, right now they are the large purchase of choice
for men seeking their second childhood. The age of riders in fatality accidents has climbed because of this new population of harley riding middle aged guys who are actually just learning to ride these very heavy beasts. There was a write up in the paper about a year ago about this.

Two older men I heard of bought these huge motorcycles and called themselves the
Hell'Zheimers.

One of them broke his ankle early after his new purchase when he dropped the "beast" on himself.

Not sure about the stats, but your perspective makes a lot of sense!!

[xeney]

I think the point about the type of bike you ride and how you are dressed is a good one. I have never experienced overtly rude behavior from a driver when I'm on my clunky pink bike, dressed for work, although people still do stupid things. Instead I get a lot of waves and good mornings. When I'm on my road bike I only get that from other cyclists.

(Drivers are even friendlier when I don't wear a helmet, but I decided that friendliness was not a good tradeoff for safety.)

[Eden]

Weirdly enough around here it is the opposite of what Grog and Xeney have experienced. When I go out in my team kit I usually get better treatment by cars than when I take the big old Marin out in my street clothes.

[missymaya]

Yeah, I see a lot of those "hardcore bikers" (motorcycles) with ginormous bikes. Two weeks ago, a woman dropped her bike at a one-way stop T-section. Cars just kept goin by, not caring and she couldnt pick the bike up. My bf and I helped her move it to the side of the road and it took all 3 of us to get it up and the lady and I arent small. One of the first things she said was that it was her first time on a bike. She was wearing a helmet and she wasnt hurt, but still, she couldnt pick up the bike and it was her first time riding. What if this were in a major intersection! Not cool. Way to contribute to traffic problems

[Deborajen]

I get treated better when I'm on my commuter wearing street clothes than when I'm in my cycling clothes and on my road bike. I stick more to the less-traveled neighborhood streets on the commute, though, vs. the county roads with more car traffic (but wider lanes and shoulders) for the longer rides. Maybe that's part of it.

Last week, our city's Metropolitan Planning Organization had a public meeting to discuss future plans for the biking/jogging/walking path system. I went to that meeting and they had a presentation with statistics from a Federal government study about cycling safety. They did stress that a cyclist is 1.8 times more likely to be struck by a car when riding on a bike path vs. riding on the road. The most common location for the crashes is where the paths intersect with driveways (ie., business entrances).

So one of the proposed solutions for the bike path system is "road diet" (ie., restripe 2 or 3 of the 8 or 9 main east-west roads so that instead of four car lanes with no median, there will be two car lanes with a turn lane in the middle plus a bike lane on the far right in each direction). I'm all for a good bike system but YEEESH! Sharing the road with car traffic squeezed down to one lane each direction - no passing, etc. - to make room for BIKES??? Boy, if drivers didn't hate us already!

Deb

[Geonz]

It may not be as bad as it sounds. They did that to a main-road-through-campus here, and now the lanes are wider so there's room for me, and cars can duck out into that turn lane to get around . Drivers are seldom obnoxious, tho' last week a probably intoxicated male hollered and stuck his hand out in the general direction of my face... then when I got right behind them in the queue at the light, leaned out and said, "Is there a PROBLEM?"... but they were pulling away. (It told me that he expected me to scoot to the front of the queue, which I avoid on the "don't make 'em pass me twice" principle and *certainly* when somebody has already been obnoxious in passing... though I had a brief visualization of just grabbing that outstretched hand knowing he might break a finger as they pulled away... tho' I'd prob'ly have gone down...)

[xeney]

They did that to several major streets in my city as well, and although I was really skeptical at first, they've worked out pretty well. I am generally nervous in bike lanes, but these bike lanes are a bit wider than the norm, and traffic has slowed down (or been redirected onto other streets or the freeway), and I find myself using those routes all the time.

Those are one-way streets that were previously three lanes, now down to two lanes with wide bike lanes on each side (one-way bike lanes, each going the same direction as the traffic). If you're in the left-hand bike lane you have to be sure to catch a driver's eye when a left turn comes up in order to avoid getting creamed, but I have found that the drivers on those streets are pretty attentive and even friendly.