Re: I have been CHALLENGED. . .

On 2008-06-09, Dave Brown (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
In article <o15n44t5736k5qo82ok66ngunblab20t9r@xxxxxxx>,
Just zis Guy, you know? <guy.chapman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cars are dangerous. Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people
annually worldwide, and are the leading cause of injury death in
children in most of the West.

I wonder how many of those people are on bicycles.

I wonder how many of those bicycles were doing something blatantly
against the rules of traffic, so that the car drivers had no way of
predicting what they would do next.

The answer has already been given to you upthread. 85% percent of
such collisions are determined to be the fault of the driver.


If riders are unpredictable, perhaps that means the typical driver
will be more careful around them, hence those collisions that result
in death really are the fault of inattentive/malicious drivers.

The London study that found that riders without helmets are given an
extra 6" of room suggests to me the best way of avoiding a collision
is by not wearing a helmet, and this might extend to being (slightly)
unpredictable. Touring friends of mine tend to deliberately wobble a
bit when out in the middle of nowhere, and they hear a road train
coming up behind them. Look a bit unpredictable, and the truck
drivers seem to get the idea that it might be a good idea to slow down
from 120km/h while passing the cyclist.

It's not about rules-lawyering for
the sake of rules-lawyering. It's about cyclists making things safe
for themselves by remembering that there is other traffic on the road
and the vast majority of it can kill them.

'Course, I get pissed off at cyclists who blow the red just because
they can, but in certain limited circumstances, I too blow a red.
There was one 6 sided intersection in Melbourne that just refused to
register the presence of a bike - I could lay the bike down flat over
the sensor loop, and sit there for 15 minutes and it still wouldn't
change. At 2am, it would cycle between the other 4 roads, but not
mine. Without any traffic on any of the other legs, naturally enough.
On the rare occasion when it did change, it was after about a 5 minute
wait, because they forgot to tune the cycle for the fact that it isn't
always peak hour. When the road is set up with no thought given to
cyclists needs, you can possibly be sympathetic as to why cyclists
might not obey every single law relevant to cars only (since traffic
lights in particular are meant to ration a limited amount of space
available that simply is not a problem for smaller vehicles).
'course, most drivers push the amber lights and red arrows at traffic
lights, so it's not just the majority of cyclists who largely ignore
their chosen set of rules.

--
TimC
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1 ...
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