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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest, the real reason is that cyclists are frustrating to drivers merely by being cyclists. They're slow so they force the driver to either try to overtake or slow down everyone behind them and most people when driving will feel a pressure not to slow down the journeys of others behind them.

So long as cyclists and drivers share the same roads it will always exist, some drivers will just be better about it than others.

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It also annoys me when somebody is moving too slow in the aisle at the grocery store, but I've literally never once seen someone flip out and yell at or physically push past someone for moving too slow in that context.

We've had 100 years to examine the effects of driving on people's brains and it's...deranging, clearly.

Relevant Oatmeal cartoon:

https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off

Lol, good one, never knew about the oatmeal.

It's so common we even have a name for it: road rage. What it is about driving that induces rage in so many people is beyond me.

This 1950 cartoon depicts Goofy -- an ordinary, kind, thoughtful citizen -- turning into a monster when he gets behind the wheel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwPSIb3kt_4

The phenomenon has been around as long as there have been automobiles.

The funny thing though is that, in most urban settings, this is completely untrue. Cyclists actually speed things up by creating less traffic. Every cyclist on the road means less cars on the road.

And the speed of traffic is not determined by the speed of the cars, which most drivers seem to believe for some reason. In a city, the speed of traffic is entirely determined by the stop signals. There is a fixed time it will take you to get from A to B if you abide by the rules and don't run through every stop light. That fixed time depends somewhat on how many other cars are on the road, since you might wait for several signal changes at each light but the light changes have often been designed for throughput.

So even though you think you can go faster than the cyclist, you likely can't, at least averaged over your journey. They are probably actually going faster than you on average. Sure, you can drive faster for that short stretch before the next light, but what's the point? You are just burning more gas and if you pull some "skillful" weaving maneuvres around the cyclist, then you are endangering lives too.

Well, no, for some cyclists the alternative is the bus, not a car

> The funny thing though is that, in most urban settings, this is completely untrue. Cyclists actually speed things up by creating less traffic.

Citation please.

> Every cyclist on the road means less cars on the road.

While that part is certainly more true than not, the implications of fewer cars but several bottlenecks added to the traffic system is far from certain and likely relies on so many other factors than just the number of bikes on the road.

This kind of information is easy to google and also easy to prove to yourself by just making an honest attempt to get places by bicycle. But here is one example of a study:

https://www.fastcompany.com/1707222/bike-computer-study-prov...

I am not a traffic engineer but I think if you know a few simple numbers like average travel distance, average car size, bike size, etc. you can see how it will be difficult to design any system where cars will beat bicycles. The only conceivable way for this to work is to space everything 20 miles apart with 8 lane highways connecting them and even then you still have last mile problems in such a system that necessarily slows things down. Even the freeways themselves can be bumper to bumper at rush hour, just look at the Katy Freeway in Houston.

Basically, there are already bottlenecks in car traffic systems and there is no way to avoid them because of induced demand. Adding cycling infrastructure will not hurt drivers but would help get more people on bikes.

Not a citation but most intersections are literal chokepoints for traffic. The throughput of those decide the speed of traffic. You can lookup "Cities in Motion fix traffic" on Youtube if ypu want proof. So when you except that throughput is speed, you understand why every car comercial is shot at 3am traffic.

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