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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Victimblaming is par for the course whenever a cyclist gets injured. It's really infuriating. I don't think that blaming the driver is good either, as the article says, most of the time it's a failure of the infrastructure that even made the situation possible. Very few drivers try to actively kill cyclists.

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You should try cycling in my town. Okay, that's hyperbole but the way the drivers of many vehicles show massive aggression towards cyclists on the roads is narrowing the margin between an accident and a murder.

If you build roads only for cars, drivers will be pissed off when cyclists intrude on “their” space. Just like a cyclist would be pissed off if there were people walking in the bike lane. The structure of the world influences how you feel about people in it. Also definitely a bunch of assholes, but assholes tend to be fairly evenly distributed throughout the world

It's not very nice to cycle in my town either, but I don't think that they actually intend to cause a crash.

Having had an SUV drive literally drive up over the curb yelling because I was bicycling on the sidewalk I'm not willing to assume they don't ever intend to hit me. I've also had people swerve at me when I was on the gravel beside the road with a full lane-width shoulder between me and the white lane edge - they had to swerve entirely out of their lane and off the area it was legal for them to drive on to get near me. I think there's a certain sort of road rage that some people see a safe victim for and just cut lose.

They may not actually intend to cause a crash but they certainly don’t care if one happens as consequence if their actions.

That is the thing that annoys me the most. You don't walk on train tracks, you don't drive on the sidewalk. Excessive speed differences like these are dangerous. Either accept that cycling on the road is dangerous and work with that mindset or choose a fitting medium to travel for the ground given. On a bike, you are weaker and slower than the cars you share the road with. Being hit by a car won't fix infrastructure.

Bicycles are vehicles. Vehicles belong on the road. Where else?

On the bike lane. There is none? Either well behaved and aware of the circumstances on the road or under the car.

Every cyclist is inherently more well-behaved than anyone driving a dangerous, noisy and polluting machine driving through a populated area.

If your oh-so-superior lifestyle is so much better, just move to a country where cars don't exist.

Cars and bikes do not belong on the same road without seperation. Mixing different speeds of transportation on the same road is inherently a stupid idea. And if you hold up everyone, don't expect people to like or respect you. Maybe i should start to park in bike lanes. Same issue really.

Why, yes. I pollute less and I'm drastically less likely to kill someone. I don't drive people mad with noise. My lifestyle is superior. Deal with it.

> Cars and bikes do not belong on the same road without seperation

That is not true. Even inside towns, cars can be driven safely at reasonable speeds of 10-20 km/h.

Well why are you still around cars when your lifestyle is so superior? There must be billions of people choosing the "superior" life.

How great that you are so superior yet you want cars to take 2-10 times as much fuel to let them drive at speeds they are not made for while creating more traffic jams. The next time i overtake a cyclist i will keep that in mind and use the first gear and full throttle.

People like you are the reason why "cyclist" becomes an insult. Justifying being annoying is a great way to make you popular i've heard.

> Well why are you still around cars when your lifestyle is so superior?

Tragedy of the commons.

> Justifying being annoying is a great way to make you popular i've heard.

Seems to work for you.

> Tragedy of the commons.

Ah so you’re saying the lifestyle isn’t superior because it throws self interest out of the discussion.

And yes, it works out quite well for me. My hatred for cyclists who don’t use the bike lanes built literally for them is growing daily and so is my skill to hold the horn for minutes and holding low speeds in first gear. They want coexistence and they get coexistence.

Especially those zigzagging with reckless speed between pedestrians on the pavement and not respecting traffic signals.

Even those. Disturbing pedestrians is not okay, of course. But why do people ride on the pavement in the first place? Because car drivers are making the road too dangerous.

Cyclist are a menace for well behaved pedestrians. They are very aggressive and endangering the well being of other people in the city centers, which are closed to general traffic or on walking paths outside of cities. Recklessly speeding between pedestrians and doing risky maneuvers thinking they are on the Tour the France.

Are we? I must be doing cycling wrong.

Yes you probably are. You should try talking to a pedestrian sometime, to hear how irresponsible and dangerous cyclist are.

I dislike cyclists too, but this one is entirely on the drivers. Looking what vehicles are ahead of you and not running into them is not a difficult task. I think VR simulators with eye tracking could be used in the future to screen drivers who lack the required spatial abilities and keep them off the road.

There is one class of accidents where I think there is some culpability both on the part of the cyclists and infrastructure makers, though. Where the dedicated bike paths and roads intersect, there is often not enough visibility due to signs, hedges, pylons, etc. to spot some of the faster Lycra types in time. I suppose the well-meaning infrastructure makers assumed everyone is a casual cyclist going slow enough to be spotted in time.

No, not actively. But they took the decision to pilot tons of metal through a populated area. If you could have avoided that at all, e.g. by taking public transport or cycling yourself, and hit someone, you fully deserve the blame.

> Victimblaming is par for the course whenever a cyclist gets injured.

To be fair, the injured party in an accident has no particular relevance to who is at fault.

At least in my city the statistics pretty clearly show that the drivers are "at fault" most of the time, but as I said, I believe the people responsible for the infrastructure are actually at fault. We could make our roads much safer by building them differently, but for some reason we don't.

Because to spend money on bicycle infrastructure will have to mean breaking the dominance of the car. And although rationally this would be the best thing one could do these days (at least in cities), people absolutely hate to share the road with cyclists.

For this to become more acceptable you have to have more motorists that ride the bicycle. And for that to happen you have to have better bicycle infrastructure.

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