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Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

I’ve listened in on a few community board meetings on road safety in New York City in order to better understand the situation, and was really put off by how the bicycle advocates were simultaneously demanding more protection from the police while openly mocking the suggestion that they need to stop running red lights. The hypocrisy of disrespecting the law while requesting more severe enforcement of the law against their opponents felt really gross and caused me to check out on the issue of bike safety completely.

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I'm not condoning it, but you might want to understand why cyclists typically run red lights and stop signs. The reason is the top most dangerous spots for a cyclist are 1) sitting at an intersection and 2) passing though an intersection. If I cross an intersection starting from non-zero momentum I can cross it in 2 seconds. If I start from zero it take more than 5. Now I'm not just going to go through an intersection without checking, but I'm going to slow down, check, and go, because that's what's safest for me. This is what I see the vast majority of people do. Now I've seen people not do that and just blast through, but I can't count more than 5 in my entire life that have done that. You know what happens when you do fully come to a stop and the intersection is clear? Cars honk at you. Cars get real close. People yell about how you aren't supposed to be on the road and threaten you. I'll take my chances with the intersection, considering I've been chased by some of these people on more than one occasion.

This again comes back to the fact that cyclists are neither pedestrians nor motorized vehicles. It isn't a surprise that they want to be treated like cyclists and not be in that binary classification. It is only hypocrisy if you use the wrong classifications. If you're really trying to understand bike safety try riding in their shoes for a month or two. You'll start to get it real fast.

While the cyclists might have very valid reasons for breaking the law, the fact is that at present, the law classifies them as "vehicles" and classifies them as subject to the same rules as the other vehicles (the cars).

Regularly watching cyclists flaunt the rules that the car driver would be cited for breaking, and never seeing a single cyclist cited for the law breaking, leaves a foul taste for cyclists in the mouths of many motorists. They don't get to run stops or red lights with impunity and without punishment.

So as long as the law says cyclists must obey the same rules car drivers are also supposed to obey, the subset of cyclists that break those rules on a regular basis do not help, in the least, the arguments to try to convince car drivers to be more respectful of cyclists.

The start should be the cyclists obeying the same rules as the cars (which would help with not pissing off numerous car drivers daily) while working the politician angle to change the rules for cyclists to something safer for cyclists (and at which point the car drivers will no longer have a way to rationalize their hatred of the cyclists as just "law breakers").

> The start should be the cyclists obeying the same rules as the cars (which would help with not pissing off numerous car drivers daily)

The problem is that as your parent commenter pointed out obeying these laws also pisses off drivers. Drivers get pissed off when cyclists take the full lane, and they get pissed off when cyclists come to a full stop in front of them at a stop sign. I don't run red lights and stop signs on my bike and it annoys me when people do, but I feel like the many violations drivers commit every day are just normalized because there are so many more drivers than cyclists.

Not to mention that safety is more important than getting a ticket. It is unsurprising that people choose the safer option over the legal option. Plenty of laws are broken and "it's the law" has never been a great excuse.

We should also consider that many people have different definitions for "running a stop sign" and it isn't equally applied to cars and bikes. A roll at a stop sign is ignored for a car but "running" for a bike. I don't blow through (that's irresponsible), but I do roll, per the given reasons above (funny enough I never roll when driving).

> never seeing a single cyclist cited for the law breaking

Every cyclist I know has at least one story of being pulled over by a cop for perfectly safe, oftentimes strictly legal riding.

On the other hand, you'd be hard-pressed to find a motorist that ever faced consequences for murdering a cyclist.

> Regularly watching cyclists flaunt the rules that the car driver would be cited for breaking

Yes and no. I am sorry when cyclists flaunt the rules — it does happen — but there are also those of us that strictly obey the law. (It helps keep me alive.) But I see cars break many of the same rules, quite often. For example, seeing a car run a red isn't even a rare thing. (A rare one is seeing a car driving the wrong way.) Between the two groups, I don't think I see one break the rules more often than the other. (I certainly see more violations from motorists… but I also see more motorists.)

> never seeing a single cyclist cited for the law breaking,

I've seen this, multiple times. Oddly, only while biking. Probably about as (in)frequently as I see motorists get cited.

> So as long as the law says cyclists must obey the same rules car drivers are also supposed to obey, the subset of cyclists that break those rules on a regular basis do not help, in the least, the arguments to try to convince car drivers to be more respectful of cyclists.

That there are those out there that don't obey the law should not matter to validly argue that the world would be better — that is, fewer cyclists would die — if both motorists and cyclists alike would obey the law.

This makes absolutely no sense.

If you’ve ever biked in a city, you would know that the people who get pissed more than anyone else by bikers following red light rules are the cars behind them that cannot accelerate when the light turns green, because the biker in front of them is slow to get going.

Invariably, they will simply get pissed and try and pass the bike dangerously, if not honk or hit them out of the way.

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