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Comment by batou | Hacker News Reader

A cyclist wiped me out at a crossing back in '02 after blowing a red light. I was on foot. Put me in hospital for 3 days and off my feet for two months. He rode away and was never caught.

If you find any justification for this you're just a selfish idiot.

Edit: Counted 6 downvotes so far. At least explain yourself. I want to hear the reason.

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...and on top of the actual collisions there are near-misses, which cause significant stress to pedestrians (I assume most of this is just through thoughtlessness rather than wanting to buzz the tower).

To be clear, I've been cycling on the streets of London since I was about 6; this comment isn't coming from a place of cycle-hatred.

This was London as well. Farringdon in particular.

I'm was also a cyclist but I wont get on the things now.

I had one in London run a red, just missed me. I said woah and kind of swung out to protect myself/hit him as you do. He took offence and started hunting me down the streets of London and then wanted to fight.

If I wasn't so hungover and with a heavy full backpack with laptops in it I might have. But I just walked away whilst he was yelling insults.

He had no time so had to run the red, but he had lots of time to take out his road rage on a pedestrian.

Good for you - probably the best outcome. I'd have probably just flipped my shit. Someone pulled a knife on me in Ealing and my reaction was to smash him in the face. Hurt like hell but not as much as the later realisation that I could have pissed him off and ended up worse off than I did.

> If you find any justification for this you're just a selfish idiot.

Sorry to hear of your accident, but the anecdote isn't statistically significant. (nor has the OP in any way causally linked his own quoted statistics on accidents to his examples of red light running).

- Some accidents are definitely caused by road users (including cyclists) running reds

- Many! cyclists do behave (extremely!) dangerously in different ways on the road

- Many accidents are caused by dangerous behaviour of road users

- Many accidents are also caused by unfortunate chance

One cyclist running a red and causing an accident doesn't translate to any conclusion whatsoever about the behaviour of all cyclists, nor is it an analysis running reds in general.

Anybody who does a hit and run is a scum-bag, bike or car. Unfortunately there are some thoughtless and selfish people in this world.

Same happened to my father while on vacation, but he wasn't hospitalized, just shook up and in distress for a couple of days. Worse, cyclist blew a red light on the wrong way.

Counted 6 downvotes so far. At least explain yourself. I want to hear the reason.

Because the press on cycling is mostly negative and as a responsible cyclist myself, who has never ran a red light, wears all mandated safety gear and knows the road code, I feel I must stifle negative speech as much as possible, to raise our public image - to have people regard us as safe and responsible and therefore be outraged at the person who ran you over and not the bicycle he was on, and to have drivers not carelessly run us over thinking "fucking cyclists".

Thank you for a balanced argument.

I'm only arguing against the attitude, not the machine. I rode one myself for 20 years.

If we could only get people like that into cars.

I'd rather he was in a car. There was a red light camera on the crossing. That's incentive not to jump the light and a penalty if he did.

Unfortunately he was dishonest and arrogant and knew he was going to get away with it because identifying a cyclist is near impossible.

If he was in a car, you'd likely be dead.

No. It wouldn't have happened at all.

because no one has ever run a red light in a car? Go on...

They do. However looking at your average trip through London by car, I see perhaps ZERO cars running reds and 30+ cyclists doing it. Some of them blast through every red without even a look.

Come to think of it I saw one getting stopped in Brentford the other day. When he saw the police car he pedalled harder until he realised they were going to cut him off.

I see people running reds all the time in their car, and never see bicyclists do it, so YMMV. Doesn't change the fact that you would likely be dead if it was a car that hit you while going through a red light.

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