Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

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I really like personal vehicles and I think we need to move in that direction, pollution aside (incl break pad dust etc.) cars (or worse, the trucks that are so popular with Americans) don’t scale. It’s really not possible to move accross DC in a car in a reasonable amount of time (even when you’re moving between suburbs and not just DC proper.) Hopefully all that is enough to convince you how important I think personal vehicles (including bicycles) are.

All that being said: DO YOU GUYS ACTUALLY WANT TO DIE? I’ve never seen any group of people ignore traffic laws and common sense more than cyclists. They consistently ignore signals and four way stops and ride on two lane highways with high speed limits, no shoulders, and blind curves.

Yes the roads need to be shared (and personally I think cars should be banned before things like bicycles and scooters) but dang people need to behave.

Meh, likely you're just used to the ways that cars fail to obey the law. Every day on my driving or biking commute I see cars failing to signal, rolling through stop signs "because you can't see from the actual stop sign", speeding, honking because they're mad at someone, directing traffic, illegally turning, failing to yield right of way, etc.

Straight up running red lights or stop signs does seem like it is overrepresented by cyclists, but I really don't they they're overrepresented for generic 'breaking the law'.

You seem to be conflating law with rules of the road. The rules of the road are just how (mostly) everyone (mostly) agrees to behave (most of the time). Basically it's social consensus. The end result is similar but not the same thing as the law (which makes sense since laws reflect norms). Cars mostly follow the socially agreed upon rules of the road regardless of the law.

Cyclists and to a lesser extent scooters throw a wrench into things because we as a society haven't yet had time to reach a consensus on what the norms for these classes of traffic are and how they should behave so people fall back to the law.

This is why people get all "but the law" when cyclists run reds but don't care when cars roll stops or speed (under appropriate circumstances). We've established that the latter is ok but haven't yet reached a consensus on if the former is to be expected as part of normal traffic flow.

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