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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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

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