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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Because being 30 seconds slower to your destination requires a billion dollars of infrastructure to fix, rather than sharing a public road. Nice attitude.

I'm one of those annoying cyclists that head to the middle of the road when its narrow or has poor visibility. Its not to deliberately annoy anybody, it's to discourage impatient drivers from squeezing me into the barriers, the curbs or ditches.

I love it when somebody honks their horn and yells insults at the dire inconvenience of having to slow down for 100m, because it means I have been seen and said driver didn't kill me.

Its nothing to do with apathy and greed and everything to do with the insufferable entitlement of people who take knobs like Jeremy Clarkson seriously.

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The "Not Just Bikes" channel in YouTube makes the awesome observation that building infrastructure for cyclists actually improves driving times for a car drivers, and may be actually cheaper to implement, certainly much cheaper to maintain.

The calculation for car-saturated cities is that each drive takes as long as fastest alternative mode, and no faster. Which kinda makes sense to me - as you build more infra people chose to not drive, making driving a lot more fun for the die-hards and the ones where that's not an option.

This "speed entitlement" is something that bothers me even when I am also a motorist. I get honked out of my boots if I do not accelerate towards a red light. Drivers feel entitled to move forward as fast as possible, regardless of others, physics or logic.

I also take the lane a lot to avoid dangerous passes and don't like the entitlement of needing to drive at least the speed limit. However I do think more infrastructure's required, but mainly for a reason not mentioned here: safer infrastructure for cyclists will encourage more people to cycle, reducing the car traffic and making things more pleasant for all travelers. I know a lot of people who'd cycle more if they could do it without feeling like they might be killed every time someone else was in a rush.

(I'm in the UK where cycling on the pavement's not allowed, unless it's a marked cycle or shared lane, not sure if that's different in other countries).

a billion dollars can get you a LOT of bike infra. Or comparatively little road infra.

And "infra" can be planter boxes and moving paint, for a start.

This thread was a reminder that even in the Netherlands, when you design roads for higher speeds and try to change that by plopping down a sign, it doesn't work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_u...

From the perspective of the 20 drivers behind you, you are the inconsiderate person.

It's a safety thing as well. And those bike roads last a very long time compared to car roads. It would likely cause less polarization too!

At least in Spain there is a minimum speed at which you can legally drive (half the max)…

Your comment made me chuckle; and not because I mean to minimize what you said.

I drive a 7,500 lb diesel pickup truck as my weekend “I’m going to the boonies to play with my man toys” vehicle. It’s a big and imposing vehicle that I operate responsibly. On longer highway trips I tend to lay in the speed limit into my cruise control and simply cruise (fitting eh?) in the middle lane of a 3-lane road or the right lane of a 2-lane road.

Guess what? I get honked at for driving too slowly even when I’m traveling at 70 mph that also happens to be the speed limit.

Just yesterday an especially irate specimen became upset when I was using the left lane to pass at 70 mph (otherwise known as the speed limit) to go past a very large truck that was using the right lane at 60 mph. Someone honked at me, flashed their headlights, then eventually passed me, got in front of me, and performed a brake check on me.

Imagine how upset this wheeled menace gets when they see a cyclist taking the entirety of a narrow road! Sigh.

If you can't go the speed limit, you should get off the road and let cars pass.

Funnily enough I’ve had cars cut me off in an unsafe manner to turn right in front of me so fast I had to slam my bicycle breaks… while I was going the speed limit.

Cars feel impatient behind bikes even when travelling the speed limit.

Also, if cars that aren’t able or willing to travel the speed limit are not forced to pull over for faster traffic… you’ve never been stuck behind a truck, old person or tractor?

I would not like to be stuck behind a car either. It's even against the law where I live to impede traffic with a motor vehicle.

Its interesting to listen to truckies on the UHF when confronted with impatient drivers. They have many of the same frustrations that cyclists do when an impatient driver does something stupid or dangerous, only it usually ends badly for the motorist.

> I’ve had cars cut me off in an unsafe manner to turn right in front of me so fast I had to slam my bicycle breaks… while I was going the speed limit.

To be fair, I've had this as a driver too. Everyone has seen the driver in an outside lane cut across two lanes of traffic to take a turn that they were in the wrong lane for.

Its a speed limit, not a minimum speed.

I would recommend getting a bike and trying it out. It makes you a better driver, because being considerate of other road users is its own reward.

>Its a speed limit, not a minimum speed.

Technically and legally yes, but in practice it's the minimum you are expected to drive.

>I would recommend getting a bike

I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby.

> I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby.

I'll take "things that never happened" for two hundred, Alex

But it does happen. The probability of me encountering even one car during a bike ride is like considerably lower that you are expecting.

> but in practice it's the minimum you are expected to drive.

No, it's not. Far from it. A speed limit of 70mph on a motorway is not the minimum, just because you, or other vehicles want to exceed it.

A speed limit of 20/30mph in a city center is not a minimum; it's actively dangerous to exceed it, and if you regularly exceed these you are a danger on the road.

A limit of 60mph on a national road is often granted based on road classification rather than the actual road; There are numerous A roads in Scotland that are _not_ safe to travel at 60mph for large stretches of due to poor road camber, poor visibility, narrow lanes, etc.

> I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby.

This is a dangerous and unpredictable way to cycle, and can lead to cars overtaking you when it's dangerous to do so/they're not confident to do so, in the same way that an unconfident driver travelling at 40mph on a motorway is dangerous, or a car driving in a hard shoulder to allow overtaking is dangerous.

>and if you regularly exceed these you are a danger on the road.

98% of my driving is not in city centers

>A roads in Scotland that are _not_ safe to travel at 60mph for large stretches of due to poor road camber, poor visibility, narrow lanes, etc.

Slowing down for safety is different than going slow just because you feel like it.

>This is a dangerous and unpredictable way to cycle

It's not more dangerous that being a pedestrian. I'm already off the road before they even get close. I can trust that drivers can stay on the road.

"I do have a bike and I always get off the road to let cars pass when there is one nearby."

So if you were in London you would never get to the destination?

>So if you were in London you would never get to the destination?

I don't live in London, but if I were to do what I do where I live I would just push my bike around assuming there are always cars driving near me.

Oh bless the almighty car. We cannot question it's authority and we are all the better for serving it.

What's your point here? Are you advocating that drivers have no responsibility when it comes to road safety?

For context, everyone else's point is that both drivers and cyclists are struggling to maintain a safe environment because good infrastructure is lacking. But I just can't see your angle here.

I'm pretty sure the years where I cycled to school and work without any regard to the traffic code didn't make me a better driver; I just learned to expect the worst possible behavior from cyclists and to expect them to appear from unexpected directions (from the sidewalks, from one-way streets, running red lights...)

On Australian roads, Mustang and HSV Commodore drivers always seem to be on the verge of doing something incredibly stupid and endangering others. In reality its probably just confirmation bias but if I'm driving or cycling they always get a wide berth.

A cyclist doing something stupid is unlikely to live long and is mostly a danger to themselves.

> A cyclist doing something stupid is unlikely to live long and is mostly a danger to themselves.

well, I survived a few years of daily stupidity on two wheels.

Not just this, but you will learn to read and anticipate traffic in a far deeper way, through the human survival instinct: a slight swerve foreshadowing a lane change before an indicator is pressed; an aggressive posture and edging forward indicating unreasonable eagerness to enter an intersection. These are the kinds of things you'll particularly notice as a commuting cyclist, and which I have found to be of great value as a driver too.

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