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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Cycling in Belgium is different from cycling in the UK. From what I saw in Brugge, people just get on a bike to cycle to work, or the shops, on a regular sit up and beg type bike. They're just getting from place to place. They're not trying to set a new personal best.

In the UK, it more tends to be packs of 10 or so middle aged men aggressively riding racing bikes delaying all the traffic for 100s of metres behind them.

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For a while I lived in a city with overall car-centric culture but somewhat decent bicycling lane infrastructure (some in parks completely separate from roads), and as someone who never drove a car: racing cyclists can be a menace. Delivery couriers are nowhere near as disruptive as some of them (except delivery couriers on scooters, but those don’t go on bicycle lanes… generally).

IMO if you use public bicycle lanes for what is pretty much sport (as opposed to getting where you need to go), there should be a dedicated park or track you could use instead. Imagine if racing motorcycle owners got in groups and maxed out speedometers on city streets…

Terrible analogy. Road cyclist time trial speed tops out around 32-33 mph, and the top cyclists can sustain that for about 30-45 minutes.

"Oh no, those racing cyclists got in groups and maxed out their speedometers in the city center ... at the speed limit." See how silly that sounds?

It matters not in absolute but in relative terms. It is impossible to misunderstand that I am not talking about pedestrians and bicyclists on the roads with motorcyclists, but other drivers and riders.

The analogy is imperfect, like all analogies, and the modicum of empathy required to understand the actual point behind it may be missing in those who shout at you, who dares to ride in a bicycle lane slowly, because they take bells off their bicycles to save on weight.

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