Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

In the UK as a cyclist I still get so much hate on the road. I'm just trying to get to work like everyone else, but people still drive their cars up right behind me, squeeze past when there's not enough space, beep their horns and shout out the window.

And then the justification is always "well I saw a cyclist run a red light once, therefore all cyclists are shit"

View on HN

Motorists often forget that a lot of motorists jump red lights too, and then there's the habitual speeding that seems expected of drivers, rather than being recognised as dangerous behaviour. With red light jumping, there's also a very different pattern of behaviour as motorists will speed up to get through a light that's just turned red, whereas cyclists tend to either slow down or continue at the same pace when RLJing.

There's also a difference in where the risk is, as cyclists are mainly endangering themselves (also pedestrians, but crashing into a pedestrian is likely to hurt the cyclist), whereas motorists are mainly endangering others.

The best way of dealing with close-passing motorists is to run cameras (front and back) and let the police deal with the driver, but it depends on what area you're in as to whether the force will deal with it appropriately. Avon & Somerset is a good one in my experience.

In the UK, it's illegal for a motorist to cross a solid white center line on their side of the road to overtake a cyclist unless the cyclist is traveling 10mph or slower. I estimate less than 1% of motorists obey this law.

Rule 129:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/general-rules-t...

Some rules in the Highway Code are guidance only, but those marked with uppercase "MUST" or "MUST NOT" have legal force.

Here in NSW Australia it is almost the exact opposite now. You are permitted to cross the centre lane to overtake a bicycle (if it is safe) and need to keep a 1 to 1.5 metre gap to the bike. https://www.nsw.gov.au/driving-boating-and-transport/roads-s....

That's the law here in the UK, too, as long as the centre line isn't solid (which is what mrob was citing).

Most roads don't have solid centre lines.

The key point in that rule is that it only applies to solid centre lines. Motorists are free to cross broken lines to overtake.

Of course. The line is solid and can't be crossed to overtake slower vehicles. Not just bikes.

I think that's a really interesting law since it actually makes an exception for slow bicycles. Looks like they're such a nuisance that cars are actually allowed to overtake them despite the solid line.

Just in on my drive to work, as I approached an intersection, the light went from yellow to red. I had time to slow down and stop. I was at a complete stop for a full moment when a van in the neighboring lane comes from behind me and just full on runs the light.

Well cyclist running red lights is extremely common here in Zürich Switzerland especially during morning rush hour.

I have seen some crazy altercations between not cars and cyclist but public transport like trams and cyclist.

Once a cyclist managed to pull up to the front of a double bendy trollybus[1] I was in just to cut across the front of the bus forcing the driver to hard break. In another incident recently which ended up in the paper, a bus had to break so hard because of a cyclist that several people got injured.

[1] https://img.luzernerzeitung.ch/2020/9/30/9ae5b1ae-3593-4cc8-...

And just like that, you've proven his point.

This guy doesn't run reds, I don't either. Apparently that's irrelevant because some cyclists do (and here's a bunch of anecdotes) so it's not a problem to harrass cyclists.

Right on!

I see a car passing red light maybe twice in a year. I see a cyclist doing the same twice a week.

I see idiots at least twice a day. Does that mean it’s cool for me to treat you like an idiot? If no, then I think you may have skipped over the point of this sub thread.

I see cars driving 50km/h in a 30km/h area multiple times a day.

Everyone breaks the traffic laws, it's just that for cars it's about speed (speed limits, illegal overtaking etc) while for cyclists it's about momentum (running red lights, stop signs etc). Both are dangerous behaviors that put others at risk

Citation needed for cyclists running stop signs being dangerous. There have been numerous studies showing that at least for stop signs, it's actually safer/neutral. Anecdotally, treating stop signs as yields for biking encourages me to ride on more neighborhood streets with stop signs instead of full on signals; additionally, while stopping has negligible benefit in terms of yielding to cross traffic, doing a full stop each time means it will take much longer for me to cross the intersection which is the most dangerous part of the road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop

I live in suburbs between San Jose and San Francisco, and haven't driven in a while but on a typical car trip I see someone run almost every other light at busy intersections, seeing a motor vehicle come to a full stop at a stop sign is rarity as well unless there is a law enforcement vehicle watching. I have learned to wait after a light turns green for me defensively to make sure someone else has not decided to gun it and run the light.

You're falling into the exact same trope that the person you're replying to is admonishing.

Motorists running red lights, speeding up for amber lights, exceeding the speed limits, tailgating, dangerously overtaking and so on, is all so common as to be unnoteworthy. This doesn't justify cyclists running reds, but it should put it into perspective.

You almost never see a bunch of drivers arguing that it's OK to run red lights. It's quite common with cyclists; you can even look at the comments here and see several arguing that it's not a problem for cyclists to run red lights. Whether or not they're correct, it at least indicates that the behavior is much more common among cyclists.

>You almost never see a bunch of drivers arguing that it's OK to run red lights.

That’s because it’s assumed that it’s OK to run yellow lights. The meme goes “yellow - step on it!” And in this way cars do run red lights, it’s just that they get through much faster. They know they’re supposed to slow down for the yellow. They have enough stopping distance when it turns yellow. And they still drive fast to skip the red light. I observe this behavior all the time driving my car. I slow and stop for yellow, but the other lane speeds through.

I often see drivers arguing that not only is it ok to speed, but that drivers who obey the speed limit are actually doing something wrong!

I don't think I've ever heard of a cyclist getting mad at another cyclist for stopping at a red light. The propensity to violate traffic laws seems to be higher among drivers than cyclists.

As a cyclist who never runs red lights and always tries to communicate clearly where I am going next, there are many cyclists who don't know how to behave in traffic. Yet for every cyclist that behaves like that I will wittness a motorist who is equally wreckless. The only difference being, when the cyclist hits me, I might be hurt, when the motorist hits me I might be dead.

Additional thought here: If you take part in traffic you are taking part in some weirdly formalized form of communications. It is all about "speaking" in a way so others can understand what you like to do. And in traffic you speak by what you do, how you do it and by giving signs.

If you e.g. see pedestrians, brake and continue to roll slowly towards them in your car, you might think: "This is perfectly fine, I saw them!". But the question is: Did they see that you saw them? If not, then your slowly rolling car communicates; "Yo, I am gonna kill you!" to these pedestrians. This means in that situation the act of stopping is the clearest communication that you saw them.

Using blinkers, hand signs in the way they are intended (to communicate intent) makes also sense. On the highway check your damn mirrors before blinking unless your intent is to ram that car that could be there.

What is the point of the traffic signals? A big part of it is safety.

I promise you, no matter what cyclists are doing at red lights, cars are orders of magnitude more dangerous than cyclists.

Cyclists should obey the law, but people focusing on cyclist skipping red lights are missing the point: cars kill people, cyclists don't.

Moreover, if a cyclist causes an accident, they will almost certainly be seriously injured even if they hurt others too. Meanwhile, car drivers can expect to walk away from any low speed accident, even if they just plowed through a crowd of pedestrians.

No red lights are not a safety measure, they make car traffic go faster. Most intersections have better throughput without redlight for smaller vehicles at slow speed. As long as the speed of cars is lowered to something safe they are also a lot safer.

But that's the point! If the road was bicycles only, the traffic planning would be entirely different, most likely either no traffic light at all, or a small roundabout.

Traffic signals only exist to accelerate car traffic. They slow down everyone else.

The most dangerous thing you can do as bicyclist is stopping, because the first ~10 meters after you’ve just started cycling again your balance won’t be perfect yet. And it happens that these few meters are almost always right in an intersection, in a conflict zone with cars.

It can be very hard to understand how to move safely on a bicycle if the infrastructure is just built for motorists. The choices of different groups are motivated by different priorities. You have to understand.

Red lights are there to make car travel faster, there is ample evidence that running redlights on bicycles can be safer. But as I said it is not always clear how to act that will make stupid mistakes more frequent.

This is a subject that is hard to discuss even in the Netherlands, were they frequently remove red lights for cyclists but still fine them until it's gone.

I was thinking what proportion of red-light-running (by cyclists) is because they don't want to lose momentum, and whether that will be improved with e-bikes.

The worse are the one who ride drunk. There are a lot of people who consider that if you are drunk, driving a car is not ok (it is not), but riding a bike is ok (it is not).

The risk of severe injury to a third party by my choosing to cycle drunk is much lower though. Maybe I hit a pedestrian and they are knocked over - it's possible but very unlikely that they receive life changing injuries. If you hit a pedestrian while driving a car they probably die.

Sure it's risky for me to ride drunk - but the risk is mostly on me. I've also had far more near misses sober in peak hour than drunk at 2am. The biggest risk at 2am is a drunk driver wilfully or accidentally runs a red light and t-bones me.

Biking at night is generally very relaxing, as long as you have bright lights and keep an eye out for drunks it’s generally better than biking during the day IMO

Swiss here aswell and regular cyclist. We have seen and will see more and more space been taken by bicycles: Look at what paris did during covid: narrowed streets everwhere to make a separate bike path. Now they can’t keep up with people riding bikes and it is already chaos breaking out.

It isn’t such a drastic shift we are experiencing in Switzerland but we need to adjust the roads once created purely for cars and buses. This will automatically reduce friction.

But its a good topic to fill the newspapers…

I don't think that's really a bike specific thing. Those same drivers would likely get just as angry at a car or other motor vehicle driving below the speed limit on the same road. Maybe even angrier since they can't pass as easily.

I tried biking in London for a while and I will never try that again. Everybody hated me and wanted to kill me. Cars and pedestrians alike.

How often does that kind of thing happen? Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?

You wouldn't need to ask if you rode a bike regularly. Every 20 minutes of riding is my guess.

There's a huge variation. Some rides, I've had two or three incidents that the police have actioned after I submitted the cam footage, and other times, I can go a couple of months without a bad incident.

Motorist squeezing past at speed without adequate space? Every single time.

If you commute daily (5 times a week) then you will see at least one terrible / dangerous driver in that time period.

Some weeks it can be really bad, several a day, some weeks it will be almost silent (but always at least one nutter).

The weather makes a big difference, for some reason drivers drive a lot worse in the rain and really hot weather, usually speeding / running reds and not checking mirrors more often than in overcast / typical UK weather.

This was true for me, but now days it almost never happen. What changed was that my route got a serious upgrade, with lower speed intersections, better yield signs for everyone. All it took was a well thought out plan for all the streets with bicycle traffic.

But yeah when I am not on my daily commute you still get that kind of behaviour.

Every time you use a street together with cars. It'd be easier to ask when it does not happen because that's the exception here

I originally was making a list of every driver that came close to killing me, noting down their license plate and making a police report.

After a single day with over a dozen, I've stopped counting. Now I only note down the drivers that, when turning a corner or passing me, threw me off the bicycle and/or drove over the bicycle, damaging parts of it.

The list currently contains 2 events this month alone.

I bike with a camera. I capture cars doing illegal and dangerous stuff multiple times a day when I bike, and post it online or/and report them. So your suggestions are way off. Just in may&june I totaled over 160 reports.

Not a justification but here in CA I see cyclists cross red lights much too often. So it's not once it's way too many times. They probably think they're special somehow

I think the prevalence of this behaviour can be explained by the fact that in car centric infrastructure only people willing to take a fairly significant risk will be cycling in the first place. As a result you've selected for people willing to engage in risky behaviour towards themselves resulting in a fair few of them running red lights recklessly.

Couple this with the fact that the infrastructure was clearly not built with their safety in mind and it's no real surprise that many cyclists choose not to use it in the same way as cars.

Personally I think there's a good argument to be made for why, in many cases, it would be ok for a cyclist to carefully make their way through a junction at a red light. Although the real answer would be to build infrastructure that removes the incentive to behave that way.

I don't run red lights but I do cross on pedestrian signals from the road in such a way that probably makes drivers some angry.

The fact is it's much safer for me to clear the intersection ahead of drivers rather than have them try to pass me at the intersection. If there are two lanes of cars banked up behind me impatient people will try and pass without changing to the far lane; getting too close to me in the process.

Some signals in my city have bike boxes and secondary lights for bikes which change a few seconds before the car signals to give riders a head start - this accomplishes the same thing and feels much safer.

For example - https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-31.9548303,115.8601648,3a,5...

I one time did this in front of a police car (without thinking...), and the officers immediately pulled me over. It was evident that it wasn't for safety, it was that they felt disrespected.

Do the traffic lights actually detect bikes? Sometimes the sensors can only detect heavy objects like cars, so on a bike you can just be stuck waiting there an arbitrary amount of time if you want to obey the law.

> I see cyclists cross red lights much too often. So it's not once it's way too many times.

Anecdatum: I can stand at the junction on the main road about 200m from here and, in peak time, see 5-10 cars (on each change) either deliberately jump the amber/red on one side or enter the junction in an unsafe manner on the other. Which means upwards of 100-200 cars per hour. For cyclists, it'll rarely be one per change; maybe 10 an hour.

That's one junction, albeit on a busy road.

Don’t assume they’re not special, by law. In some states, bicycles are allowed to proceed through red lights after stopping, while cars are not. (Perhaps similar to how motorcycles in CA are allowed to split lanes while cars are not.)

I don’t really see how else to take your comment but as justification, though FWIW, studies show cars break more traffic laws way more times than bikes.

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/biking/cycli...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com