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Comment by kd5bjo | Hacker News Reader

Once you manage to overtake a tractor once, it doesn’t ever re-overtake you and make you do that work again. On sections of road with large amounts of traffic and stoplights, I’ve had to wait behind and overtake the same bicycle 5 times before I finally got far enough ahead. Most bicycle encounters are non-issues, but it’s these extended ones where it seems to the driver that they’ll never be done with this one particular bicyclist that stick in the memory and cause long-term resentment.

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I sympathize with this. And I, as a biker, don't really like being passed repeatedly either. But there are few good options: stopping in the bike lane but behind you defeats the purpose of the separate lane; I can join the car lane, and sometimes do if the flow is indeed slow enough, but then I risk being in the way if things do start moving faster, and/or pissing off a different driver who wonders why I'm not in my own lane, even though the average speed ends up being the same.

I'd suggest that the driver that is repeatedly getting ahead and then finding herself waiting at a stoplight might try driving slower between the lights, but that depends on the road conditions, and whether the lights are actually correctly timed. And on short blocks it risks causing jams. There's not really any way to apportion blame: it's a situation where it's hard for any of us to win. Maybe we just have to try to relax and get along as best we can.

If there’s a real bike lane, the overtaking shouldn’t be a problem as it should be safe for cars to pass in their own lane without needing to take any of the next lane over. Unfortunately, many “bike lanes” are too narrow and too poorly maintained and filled with parked cars. Then there’s the cyclists that think it’s appropriate to ride on the divider between the bike lane and the car lanes instead of in the lane itself.

>Maybe we just have to try and relax and get along as best we can.

That seems like the best plan, certainly. Once everybody can see each other as people instead of the enemy, there might be some chance of getting the infrastructure fixed.

>Then there’s the cyclists that think it’s appropriate to ride on the divider between the bike lane and the car lanes instead of in the lane itself.

People don't want to get doored. That's the main reason why I do this and deem this necessary. There are well traveled bike lanes out where where you do need to ride on the margin of the lane because it wasn't built parking protected and there was no space buffer set aside for car doors.

So your problem isn't with the cyclist, its with having so many cars on the roads that you can't drive faster than biking speed?

What do you expect would happen if those riders weren't on bikes? When I'm not on my bike, I'm driving (if transit worked for me, I wouldn't be on my bike)

No, my problem is with the city planners that can’t get their act together and build the appropriate infrastructure to support all the road users.

And it’s with bicyclists that don’t understand the idea of a queue for controlling access to limited resources.

And it’s with drivers that think they own the road and pass bicyclists at patently unsafe speeds and distances.

There’s plenty of blame to go around; there’s no need to restrict it to just one party.

So in that situation, aren't you the annoying vehicle that needs to be passed? You're holding up faster traffic for those 5 blocks!

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