Ah yes because every driver obeys every law all the time. It’s only the cyclists that break laws! No driver would ever consider speeding, rolling through a stop sign, or being aggressive!
Won’t someone think of the poor drivers!!
Almost all bikers are drivers but not all drivers are bikers. I think pointing fingers elsewhere is less than helpful.
Your point is well taken, but whataboutism aside, EVERYONE should be obeying ALL the traffic laws. I cycle on public roads myself and I do see other cyclists not stopping at red lights. A bicycle IS a vehicle - it doesn’t come with pedestrian rights.
Or we can just keep escalating finger pointing and law-breaking until the traffic laws are meaningless everyone is dead.
I cycle thousands of miles each year, and I haven’t seen a cyclist run a red in years. Depends on where we’re riding, I guess.
So, why are you asking me to deescalate? Have you asked everyone else in this post and the author of the comic itself? Why pick me?
Build bicycle infrastructure.
It already exists even in burbs and is commonly referred to as a sidewalk.
No, that’s atrocious.
You don’t solve one endangerment by causing another.
The pavement is for pedestrians, the road is for cars. Between the road and the pavement you need to build a dedicated cycling path, at the expense of the road if necessary.
The Netherlands has shown how this infrastructure makes cities and towns safer and more livable.
There is no excuse.
OP & sympathizers not comprehending the auto industry lobby. 🤦♀️
This thread is doing a great job of explaining why tribalism around forms of transportation is not constructive.
I am a bike rider and a car driver and I 100% agree with this. Everyone needs to follow the rules. When I’m driving, I let a bike go even if I think I have right of way. It adds 10 seconds to my day. Same thing with Bike. I give people the right of way and stop at light and stop signs looking both ways.
Who can forget the time a cyclist ran a red light and killed sixteen people?
Fair but think about hitting and killing a cyclist who had run a stop sign or light. That doesn’t just go away. The person has to live with the trauma of killing another person potentially at no fault of their own.
That’s two; fourteen more to go!
The Telegraph and LBC are both right-wing propaganda mills.
Case in point:
In 2022, Hilda Griffiths, 81, died after Brian Fitzgerald, a Credit Suisse director and member of the Muswell Hill Peloton cycling club, collided with her while riding with other members at about 29mph in the 20mph zone.
Police could not prosecute Mr Fitzgerald because “there were no criminal Acts” which could be applied to cyclists who speed, the elderly lady’s inquest heard.
That’s pure horseshit.
Still lacking context here. Vision Zero says no one should get killed by vehicles.
When did a car run a red light and kill sixteen people?
I’m sure the parent whose kid or pet gets mowed down by a cyclist going full speed will appreciate that, hey at least it wasn’t more people who got hurt or killed!
Entitled assholes exist behind many modes of transportation. That cars can cause significantly more damage doesn’t make the others less dickish, like this guy:
(and yes, I drive AND cycle AND like to jog too, depending on what the task at- hand is).
That so many have come out screaming in the manner pretty much showcases the “rules for thee but not for me” attitude.
Personally I think it’s absolutely batshit insane that people ride their bicycles on the roads with cars, if I ride a bike I’m doing it on the fucking sidewalk.
Personally I think it’s absolutely batshit insane that people walk on the sidewalk with bikes, if I walk I’m doing it on the… uhm…
Idk boss I think bikes are closer to pedestrians than a 2 ton truck.
Give cyclists lanes, so they wouldn’t have to stand in a half metre gap between an 18-wheeler and a traffic barrier covered in mix of 19th century soot and souls of the damned. Then they’ll follow the rules, case in point: entire Denmark.
In UK cities where there is extensive cycling and infrastructure, cyclists still run red lights quite often. As a cyclist I don’t obey every traffic law either.
On my old way to work there was a traffic light controlling the entrance to a car park from the main road, but entering traffic was so infrequent that it was always very tempting to dart across. On the same route, a cut across pavement for 25 metres saved negotiating a large roundabout or dismounting.
Neither place could really have had better infrastructure: the junction had poor visibility so you couldn’t see if a car was coming if you did chance it. Backing up the main road wouldn’t have been sensible so both of these mean it couldn’t have been a simple give-way. The section of pavement is narrow and on a bend, so to cycle it safely you must go slow enough to stop. Putting a cycle lane in there would have invited people to go too fast.
Live in denmark, can confirm.
I saw like hells angles waiting for the pedestrian light to go green before crossing, in the middle of the night on an empty street in denmark, so yes they seem to follow the rules there (it was a long time ago, but we don’t even did that in sweden, sweden where youd get hassled if you like didn’t have your not legally obliged bicycle helmet on).
Fucking cyclists causing all the traffic and pollution. Get a car you assholes!
I’ve been the car driver who nearly made jam out of the cyclist in the last panel. I’ve also been the cyclist hit by a car which was driving in the cycle lane.
Bad road users are everywhere and they use all sorts of transportation. Let’s stop with the division and generalisation.
one has a lot more power and uses a lot more space than the other
And we can still encourage both to obey the rules! Amazing!
rules aren’t neutral or grown out of the void. people with biases and maybe even ambitions create them for specific purposes
EDIT: To quote Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Rules governing bike traffic are generally quite reasonable though. It’s not like the enlightened traffic planners in the Netherlands went “you know what, cyclists don’t have to obey red lights” for example. So I’m not seeing the biases you’re talking about, at least in this example.
Comparing running red lights to sleeping under bridges or steal for survival seems, at best, hyperbolic. In any case I don’t think that quote supports the view that the law is intentionally biased
The lights often automatically changes to cyclists priority in many places in the Netherlands, and often provide underpasses to avoid conflict points in the first place. It is not a comparable situation. Traffic laws and infrastructure in the USA, for instance, are incredibly biased in favor of cars, so their comment is absolutely relevant.
When I bike in the USA often the safest time for me to cross an intersection is unrelated to whether I have a green light, but more related to if anyone else at the intersection does. The safest time for me to go is when no one else at the light has a green light, not when I do.
Often they will, but what about the circumstances where they haven’t? We’re talking about a bike-first country which still does this.
My whole point here is that pro-cycling rule-makers will try to make cycling work in various ways, but those ways do NOT include letting cyclists ride across junctions when there is crossing vehicle traffic. The bias the person above is talking about is not about traffic light rules; it’s about missing other bits of bike infrastructure. And if that infrastructure is missing it does not make it sensible or reasonable to break other rules as some kind of counterbalance.
It is perfectly legal in many places in the world to run a red light on a motorcycle or bicycle, provided you wait a reasonable amount of time. So your example is complicated. Simply because the magnetic strips that detects cars don’t detect them. But if run a red light after waiting, I guarantee the average person will think I’m the same as the person that flys through the intersection without slowing down. In my experience the average car driver has no idea why bicycles make the decisions they make.
And it is perfectly reasonable to break rules, if breaking them is what is keeping me alive. I really could give a shit what the law is. I care about getting to work alive. And I will make decisions to that end first and the law second.
In my state they changed the rules where a cyclist can treat a stop sign like a yeild sign, and a stop light like a stop sign.
the reasoning is this will encourage cyclists to ride through neighborhoods rather than on busier main streets. cyclists need to maintain momentum when riding, and stopping every couple blocks for a stop sign is a huge momentum killer.
obviously cyclists run a much higher risk of injury in a traffic accident than a driver. also cyclists dont really have blind spots the way cars do. so generally if a cyclist runs a stop, they have already checked for oncoming traffic. yes, there are idiots out there both driving and cycling, but typically if you saw a cyclist run a stop sign, he knows youre there and went when it was safe.
That’s a great law. That’s basically how I use them (with lots of care, obviously).
Which state?
Idaho was the first to do this. Not sure which other states have followed suit, but i think i remember 1 or 2 doing so
Washington State made this change about 5 years ago.
Yeah the world have yo be car first, that why jaywalking is illegal to free space for car.
Without cars there would be no reason to have signal lights at intersections. Cars are clunky, slow to accelerate, sound dampening and huge, which is why they need all this wasteful infrastructure to make them feasible at all. People on bikes have much better vision and hearing so if you pay attention to the traffic situation, its not necessarily dangerous to run a red light.
That’s why I love my small electric car, all your complaints are invalid for it and I don’t have to freeze or get wet when I need to travel far up a giant hill.
Electric cars are heavier, noise dampened, and have the same blind spots, they do accelerate faster though depending on the situation that can just make an inattentive driver more dangerous.
Electric cars are better environmentally then gas cars but they certainly don’t absolve the need for traffic signals the way purely pedestrian and cycle traffic would
They are better, but only in a few ways. They are still very bad for causing sprawl, they shed microplastics etc.
For the audience, tires are not made of “rubber” these days they are made from modern plastics.
In a comparison between cars and cyclists, I’m a little amused that you’d call cars slow to accelerate. When driving, my main issue with cyclists wasn’t anything to do with traffic laws; it was just that, when stuck behind them, my trip was doomed to take a great deal longer. Granted, the only thing I believe ought to be done about it is to build more bike paths, but still; a cyclist calling automobiles slow to accelerate is worth a laugh!
Ah yes acceleration = max speed
Go back to school and apologize to your physics teacher
boomer ass take
That would be your mum’s standards.
somebody recently posted a video on one of the fuckcars communities about how using boogle maps in Netherlands was impractical. In the same video they were explaining how they removed traffic lights from no car zones.
traffic lights are necessary because of motorized traffic. When you’re cycling you’re moving less than a hundred kg at about 15kmh, not +1000kg at 50kmh or more
NotJustBikes did a video on that. Really interesting
