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Comment by edmcnulty101 | Hacker News Reader

Can we write a law where cyclists cant ride on a main thoroughfare when there's a perfectly good side street a block away?

The amount of times I've seen traffic backed up for miles behind one exercise man, on a MAIN ROAD, when there's a perfectly good barely used road, literally ONE BLOCK away.

I'm all for being considerate of bicyclists but that goes both ways.

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I'm surprised the law already doesn't handle that case. In Minnesota cyclists are treated as normal vehicular traffic with a handful of exceptions, and one of those exceptions is that the cyclist cannot unnecessarily impede traffic flow. (The language of the Minnesota law as written was obviously written with the scenario you describe in mind.)

Bicyclists have places to go and those places are often, disproportionately even, on the "main road". Asking cyclists to bike at least two blocks out of their way is not reasonable. Also often those side roads have uncontrolled crossings of other busy roads which makes traversing them practically impossible.

The real question is why a car, which can effortlessly stop, go, and turn without any exertion whatsoever on the part of the driver, is permitted on the shortest route. Since it's so easy for a driver to detour to a side road, the main roads should be reserved for bicyclists and pedestrians exclusively.

Roads are made with a speed limit specifically matched for cars.

Bikes cannot achieve that speed limit.

So your thought is to slow down hundreds of thousands of cars which the road was made for... in order for cyclists not to be inconvenienced?

The only application of large-scale natural language processing in law enforcement of which I completely approve is classifying comments like these which totally misunderstand the concept of speed limit, identifying their authors, and inviting them to an all-expenses-paid driver retraining session where they might have the opportunity to regain their recently revoked driving privileges.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit

Your right! It's a speed LIMIT!

Feel free to hop on the interstate!

It's just a speed LIMIT of 70! There's no speed minimum.

Dont let those 18 wheelers push you around!

Let natural selection do its job!

>So your thought is to slow down hundreds of thousands of cars which the road was made for... in order for cyclists not to be inconvenienced?

Roads are made for wheeled vehicles, many of which are cars and many of which are bikes. Demanding they stick to the side street ghetto seems suboptimal, considering car drivers are just as lethal with respect to motorcycle riders, are they not?

Side streets rarely have bike lanes, have more 4-way stops, randomly appear/disappear and have terrible potholes for road bikes.

People act as if american side-streets aren't designed in an actively hostile manner for traffic calming that makes biking really difficult.

Most importantly, most cyclists are using google maps like the rest of us, and google sends us on the main street. So, that's where we go.

So cyclists would rather inconvenience hundreds of people down to 5 mph than deal with some inconvenience themselves.

That side street is probably full of stop signs? We don't go out of our way to ride on busy roads.

So slow down hundreds of people to 5 miles an hour..... versus stopping at a few stop signs...

cyclist mentality is very interesting.

why don't you go to the perfectly good barely used road one block away? bikes have a right to the road too

You're right! Bikes have a right to the road! Feel free to hop on the interstate! Don't let those 18 wheelers push you around! Let natural selection do its job!

These kinds of annoyances are almost always an infrastructure problem, as the Dutch have shown. If you correctly separate modes of transit according to speed on a high enough density of route links, blockages like this are eliminated. It's possible that those side streets are not optimal for their journey. You seem to be assuming that person on a bicycle was traveling for recreational purposes and not necessarily transiting from point to point.

The goal of their transit is irrelevant.

Riding on a main road and slowing down hundreds of people by orders of magnitude is an jerk move.

Personally, I view hundreds of predominantly single-occupant, predominantly internal-combustion automobiles clogging up my neighborhood's main thoroughfare 18 hours a day to be a jerk move at a scale much more vast than inconveniencing those motorists for some number of minutes. The goal of their transit is irrelevant, as you say.

But anyway. This frustration is why "share the road!" is stupid and inconveniences everyone. I don't like it either. As an occasional bicycle user I don't want to be in your lane any more than you want me to. It's very dangerous and 1/10 motorists are needlessly belligerent. Perhaps you should contact your local transit authority to support the addition of a separated bicycle lane for that main road, so that you don't have to share a single lane with cyclists. Or the side roads you speak of should be beefed up as bicycle infrastructure and cyclists banned from the main road. I am quite sure that there is a reason they're on that main road, because I bet it is unpleasant to cycle on it.

If you don't like sitting in traffic, (who does?) you have to think like a bicycle user, and reduce blockers to cycling because if your area has population growth and finite land, there is no solution to traffic other than getting people out of cars and into other modes of transport, including bicycles. Blaming bicycle users for cycling and saying "why don't they cycle somewhere else?" is not a valid solution.

No we just need to let natural selection take it's course as cyclers share the road with multi ton metal vehicles.

I refer you to my previous comments explaining how I also don't like "share the road" idea. We are on the same page on this. Go complain to your county or city or whichever rather than wishing literal death to your neighbors.

These folks know exactly what they're doing. I've worked with one of them -- he saw it as a plus that he's slowing down drivers and blocking traffic and would cycle in a way that made it impossible to pass him. He framed it as environmental activism.

It's the cyclist equivalent of rolling coal.

In more than one other sub-thread here, people have offered variants on the theory that some drivers are hostile toward cyclists and/or more likely to notice cyclist transgressions because those cyclists constitute an out-group and that's what we always do with out-groups. "Treating them differently just because they choose to live a bit differently" is the most recent version I saw.

Well, that cuts both ways. A certain subset of cyclists treat anyone in a car, or indeed not on a bike, as an out-group. They notice transgressions more, deny the out-group's right to do what they're doing, etc. It's not activism. Positive change is not the goal. It's just venting their own unresolved anger and frustration. If the putative cause of their complaint disappeared, they'd miss it ... and then they'd find a new "cause" to be anti-social about.

The different treatment is injury and death vs slight inconvenience. It's an asymmetrical arrangement in favor of the car for any kind of two wheeled conveyance. Or are you fearful of ten-speed riders traumatizing you by impolitely smashing up on the windscreen instead of politely disappearing under the wheels?

You are not wrong though. It just is not a defensible position. You won't be the one who suffers.

You're missing the point. What matters is that GP's friend had used "activism" to describe acts of simple spite or revenge, and the label does not apply. Such behavior stands in the way of real activism. Perhaps you feel the spite is deserved, the revenge justified, based on the level of potential consequence. Your use of hyperbolic imagery and character assassination suggests that you might, and I might not even try to dissuade you ... but don't call it activism. Words have meaning, and a potato is not a pear.

I don't treat excercise man differently because they're an outgroup.

I treat them differently because they ride 10 mph on a road regulated for safe travel of above 40 and slow hundreds of people down.

I also have this complaint. Where I live there are miles and miles of closed-access bike trails. The state spent loads of money turning old railbeds into trails specifically for pedestrians and bicycles.

But those aren't good enough for the exercise man. He has to ride on the winding, hilly, full-of-blindspots roads where cars routinely are doing 45+. More than once I've nearly gone into the ditch because exercise man was in the middle of the road over the crest of a hill. (I separate people who are commuting on their bikes from the ones that are clearing doing it for recreation).

I'm all for biking - it's great for your body and the environment but I question those that choose to co-mingle with cars when there are other options. In a collision between 250 pounds of bike + human vs a ton of plastic and steel...the ton of plastic and steel is going to win pretty much every time.

sounds like you were driving quite unsafely when you nearly went into the ditch, i'd slow down on such roads

Sounds like you don't often drive outside the a city. I live in a county with a _significant_ Amish population and am well accustomed to non-motorized vehicles on the road. The difference between the Amish and most cyclists is that they recognized that they're vulnerable on their horse and buggy, follow the rules of the road, and they generally stick to the side roads whenever they can for obvious reasons.

I'm continuously amazed that HN, a site full of smart people, can't seem to wrap its head around the fact that riding a bicycle on a road with a bunch of vehicles is _inherently_ more dangerous for the cyclist than it is for the driver.

Should drivers pay attention more? absolutely. If I had a magic wand to wave that would instantly add separate lanes for cyclists I would but the fact is that America's streets are mixed use. It's all well and good that the driver of the car is "responsible for not hitting you" but what's that matter if you get killed or paralyzed because your hubris demands that you be able to share a shoulder-less road with tractor trailers?

"I'm continuously amazed that HN, a site full of smart people, can't seem to wrap its head around the fact that riding a bicycle on a road with a bunch of vehicles is _inherently_ more dangerous for the cyclist than it is for the driver."

can you find me one person who actually thinks this? or did you just make this up.

i am personally in the reality camp and find cycling in traffic to be quite a bit more dangerous than being piloting a car

> i am personally in the reality camp and find cycling in traffic to be quite a bit more dangerous than being piloting a car

That is literally what I said but you just had to get the snark in, didn't you?

ok ignore that comment, but tell me who believes cycling in traffic isn't more dangerous than driving a car since you've indicated that HN (the monolith) seems to think that

They're not having a problem because of the speed...they're having a problem because the excercise man in front of them is blocking traffic.

You must live in Colorado? Or someplace like it.

Excercise man rides on roads that are already dangerous for cars: roads with no shoulder, windy, high elevation, icy, huge drops on either side.

Excercise man makes that situation much more dangerous.

I'm rarely upset when I see an excercise man was inured in the newspaper.

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