Responses to unicycling
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
> Almost 50% of those encountered, more often men than women, responded verbally (box). The sex difference in the type of response was striking. Around 95% of responses from women praised, encouraged, or showed concern, and women made few comic or snide remarks. In contrast, only 25% of the comments made by men indicated praise, appreciation, or neutrality, whereas 75% were attempts at comedy, often snide and proffered combatively as a put-down. Equally striking was their repetitive nature, even though given as if original—almost 66% of these “comic” responses referred to the number of wheels (the most common), the absence of handlebars, or a part having being lost or stolen (box). Less than 25% used less obvious snide humour, but often with stylistic repetition.
I often felt bad -- riding a unicycle is incredibly quiet (as there is no chain or gearing), and it's disturbingly easy to sneak up on a lone pedestrian at night and give them a scare when you announce that you're passing them on the left. I'm a rather large male, and recognize I can strike an imposing figure, and hated scaring people like this. I took up whistling whilst riding near people at night just so they could know that I was there.
This was also an interesting thing to read:
> Aggressive boys
> “Do you want to knock him over?” “Yes I bet I could do it”
> While kicking a football, “Got a good target”
> Riding at me on bicycle, “Fall off granddad”
> Sudden loud shouts, then they threw small pebbles
> Loud noises, then “You’re gonna fall off . . . you’re gonna fall off”
There were the regular jeering remarks, and even the more aggressive actions of going so far as to steal my unicycle a couple of times -- thankfully I was always able to recover it (a friend would call me and tell me it was found lying in a parking lot across campus -- clearly abandoned after they gave up trying to ride it).
It's an interesting case-study on how society reacts to outliers -- this was a beautiful set of data to read. Thank you!
This is also a thing with these electric scooters and such.
It's just the speed difference that can really surprise you; I'm "scared" by that. I had this just yesterday where a kid passed me on a narrow footpath. I wouldn't have minded to step aside, but I do need to know they're there.
Really should have a bell. I don't know how that would work on a unicycle though.
(In related news, Firefox's built-in spellcheck doesn't include "unicyclist" but Chrome's does.)
It does in the British English dictionary, but it's not recognized in the en-US one. I had assumed they would both use the same dictionary, but maybe not(?)
You may /want/ to, but you categorically do not /need/ to. I'm going to get by you on my bike faster than you will notice and react, and if I'm moving anywhere near commute speeds, I will have to holler against the wind, and pray you move predictably.
It's vastly safer for both of us (although perhaps startling for you) if I move through your reaction zone quickly enough to avoid you unpredictably leaping into the collision zone.
Also, feel free to use the roads and bike lanes that exist for your pleasure rather than putting yourself through the emotional angst of lamenting the negativity you've put on however many poor pedestrians per day.
If you're sharing a space with pedestrians and moving at speeds that defy their reaction times, you're rude at best and dangerous at worst - take that vehicle on the road!
I'm going to turn around and look, because I can't tell which way is left in less than a second, then jump in a random direction in an absolute panic.
There's also a chance I might move right in front of you because I decided to move instead of look and got the directions mixed up.
Unicycles don't react to changes very well -- they're highly momentum-based, and bumps affect them much more than bicycles. Passing on the grass is possible, but difficult (especially with a 24" wheel like I used), and was often the source of wipeouts when I would attempt to go around a group of pedestrians that was taking up the entire path. Inevitably, this was a gaggle of cute girls, who would giggle as I faceplanted into the grass. Not my finest moment. But if nothing else, this should certainly cement the idea that I certainly didn't unicycle because it was "cool". :)
But it wasn't just pedestrians and unicycles on campus sidewalks -- bikes were extremely common, and pedestrians were used to getting out of the way of cyclists. It's generally that they just couldn't hear me coming.
Make yourself known, wait for the acknowledgement, pass at a reasonable speed.
If you can't do that then wait for 20 seconds.
It's not hard.
I'm also going to say that "it's vastly safer" is nonsense your brain made up to self-justify your crummy behaviour.
It's a footpath. For pedestrians. To walk. I don't mind if people use it for other things, within reason, but not with this attitude.
And look, people misjudge these sort of things all the time. I've almost certainly done that myself on occasion. It happens. But when you intentionally do it, and try to justify it ... it should be obvious I'm not especially impressed by that.
> and pray you move predictably.
You even admit it yourself. In traffic one generally cannot take unnecessary chances with other people's safety.
*: it's very different in most other activities, I admit. When I ski, I have to be intensely aware of anything rowdies behind me might be doing so we can be safe when they zip by by less than two meters. A similar reasoning is probably at play here, but wide carving turns on easy slopes are still best reserved for early mornings or weekdays. Well-disciplined short turns look good too :)
It is quite likely that I will notice when you're 10ft behind because of any small mechanical creak or rock you ran over or such, or because I was looking over my shoulder.
I will quite possibly then panic and jump in a random direction and maybe get us both killed.
I don't have any training or script to follow for that. I'll respond the only way I know how, like as if I just heard machine guns and bombs behind me.
Bicyclists tend to assume others have their spatial processing and just naturally know what to do.
And sadly, as you experienced, that reaction is often negative.
I've done quite a few things in my life that are "not normal", and the negative responses are utterly incredible. It would appear the more miserable a person is in their life, the more they want to lash out at someone doing something different to try and get away from that miserable. Almost like they want you to stay trapped in the miserable because they themselves feel trapped, and they feel cheated knowing someone else has (or is trying to) escape.
I find this shockingly true in Australia (where I'm from, but have not lived for almost 20 years). The national pastime is winging (complaining), but if you change your life to do something else, people will very quickly put you down and tell you to get right back into line. I always have a strong feeling that society says it's unacceptable for adults to just "play" or "have fun" for the sake of having fun. Everyone expects you to grow up and get a miserable job and be miserable like everyone else, and if you do anything that looks even remotely fun you'll be cut down like a tall poppy
This one is pretty clever. Not aggressive or threatening, just good old psychological manipulation. Reminds me of John Mulaney's bit on 8th graders.
I thought there were unicycles with gearing. And mountain unicycles. Which makes them all the more fascinating.
Most regular unicycles don't have chains or gearing -- they're just direct-drive.
I mean, this is pretty common. Most people aren't very funny, when you get down to it, and if they're trying to be humorous on the fly, they will almost always tell an incredibly tired joke.
You're a unicyclist; you hear it all the time. They rarely see unicyclists, so to them (and their friends) it's not a stale joke (though it wasn't very funny even when it was original).
Brilliant.
Most common comment by far: "Do a wheelie", second -- "Where's your other wheel/You've lost a wheel" (which is answered by the tshirt -- "My other wheel is on my other unicycle".
* It was a half off sale (to hikers)
* I took off the training wheel (to bikers, if they seem smarmy)
These days most of my responses are very positive, almost universally. 15 years ago this wasn't the case, especially on the street--lots of people yelling "FALL!" out their window to scare you, etc. I think a big part of the long term change has been "extreme sports" becoming a very broad umbrella.
This is a fantastic retort.
He recently switched to going around with free skates - I'm trying to learn them as well (I never did get around to picking up unicycling unfortunately).
I've done two organized long distance unicycling trips before: Vietnam, with ~20 riders, and Kenya to Tanzania with ~10 unicyclists (and a few bikers filling in the slots). There were a lot of programmers, and also a few people that collected other "body as puzzle" skills--juggling, circus arts, etc.
I think the commonality is more that the kind of brain that can push past the challenge of learning to unicycle is the kind of brain that can learn a lot of technical computer skills by applying the same tenacity.
My own history with unicycling is pretty happenstance. When I was 14 I said I wanted one for a birthday present, because I liked the challenge of riding a bike around with no hands.
And I got one! So I learned to ride it on the street, but skill-wise I basically got a free mount and stopped.
Much later, in my 20s, a friend pasted a unicycling video and said he wanted to try it (think "skate video", but unicycling). I said I actually had one in a closet, so we pulled it out and just kept at it after that. After a few weeks we were out trying a flat trail.
I'm 43 now, and my riding comes and goes as I remind myself it's an enjoyable way to get some exercise. I'm also a B- tier rider, if that.
This is my favorite general unicycling video with one of the pioneers, Kris Holm. This really gets into the "but why?" part of it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nPc2phfMLU
But they are useful as drag brakes! I run a disc brake on my mountain unicycle, and really it's to make super-steep downhill segments feasible (at least without requiring a tremendous amount of back pedal pressure). I choose a brake used for trials biking with a long throw range.
I have a rim brake on my 36" unicycle. In that case it is helpful to reduce stopping distance, in part because the crank-to-wheel ratio is bonkers, but it's still primarily used as a drag brake on long downhills.
But yeah, on a mountain/street unicycle, your feet aren't that far off the ground, and you can't really go faster than sprinting speed. The big risk is getting tangled up in a weird way on the mountain.
36" distance unicycles can go faster than sprinting speed. Bailing unexpectedly on a fast 36" results in a few galloping steps and hopefully not a trip and slide...
Fun little unicycling factoid: "UPD" stands for Unplanned Dismount, and really is what tends to happen more than actual crashes. You realize your balance envelope is blown and there's no hope of making the line you're trying to hit, so might as well just dismount gracefully while you still can.
Not a shock that women are a bit friendlier. Whereas men try to be a bit more clever for the sake of fun.
I spent a decade selling cars and the part I miss most is the totally crazy humor between salespeople and management. You know how a salesperson goes to talk to his manager every iteration of any negotiation? Every single time my manager would have a funny quip when I returned. And I'd also try to have something funny to say about either the manager or the customer or myself.
OP would label all this as hateful or negative which really it wasn't.
It's especially terrible if you have to go along in the workplace because you're talking to your boss and are expected to laugh about his (potentially charged) "funny quips" because "guy talk", amirite? Ugh ..
OTOH he thinks women saying “You should dress up as Santa for the children” is praise and not a put-down.
(Seriously I think it really depends on the tone and context.)
Any question which isn't asked with the intention of receiving a response can be considered snark, which while it may not directly be intended as a put-down, is still insulting because it is making light of the author who is not obviously partaking in unicycling to make people laugh.
Nobody is suggesting that humorous comments are an "attack". The point of the article was to differentiate between the joking comments made by men and the more benign comments made by women. Making light of someone's activity is still belittling, even if not a direct insult. Even if not said directly, the implication is "you're doing something I find funny."
> people go "huh that's weird I have to say something let's try gentle humor"
That seems to be the crux of the matter: people who a) believe they need to say something at all, b) decide that it must be something "funny", and then c) actually say it out loud. Have those people ever stopped to consider that their opinion isn't wanted?
Being born with 2 leg, they aren't "going out of [their] way" though..
Yes. I will frequently find what other people are doing to be funny, even absurd. I will often vocalize it. You will not convince me this a moral wrong. I am, however, open to other people vocalizing this about my behavior. Recently, I purchased one of every bran flake cereal in the cereal aisle to determine which was best. I received light jest from the public who viewed my cart. It made sense, because what I was doing was bizarre. I was not injured. It was not an attack. I probably shouldn't do it regularly.
I do attempt to avoid jest about things people have no or minimal control over (race, disability, disfigurement, sexual orientation) or that are core pieces of people's life (religion or lack thereof, financial status, spouse). I am willing to be corrected by someone passionate about a subject. I am also very willing to be wrong, if someone demonstrates that unicycling is actually a way better method of transportation.
They do not care about correcting you and why should they. No one has any reason to try to convince you about unicycle effectivity, regardless of reason they drive it for.
/hulkhogan
Especially when it's done frequently / regularly, the line between "consistent neutral-ish jokes" and "mild harassment" can become a bit blurred.
Not saying that such things should be outlawed or policed or whatever -- I just shrugged it off and didn't let it bug me. But if I'm trying to quantify it as positive or negative, it usually felt like a joking comment made at my expense.
Additionally: what motivations does one have to ride a unicycle instead of a bicycle? I can only think of reduced storage space being a practical benefit.
You're assuming a practical benefit but maybe people do it for fun, the challenge, or simply because of the novelty.
> Additionally: what motivations does one have to ride a unicycle instead of a bicycle? I can only think of reduced storage space being a practical benefit.
For me, it was more fun than walking, and was good balance practice. It was faster than walking, and unicycles are smaller than bikes. Additionally, I juggle, so this was a nice thing to practice to put into my act.
We are on a site named Hacker News, after all.
> Because it's there. — George Mallory
To put it perhaps more clearly, there are some of us men for which it definitely is true. Source: self.
For many men, this type of comment is frequently made without any malice. (The original archetype several levels up was "Run Forrest, run!")
This seems like it fits into the general tone of a large fraction of interactions I've had with other men. Either I missed a lot of intended aggression, or this large volume of interactions wasn't actually intended to be aggressive. Of course, it's possible for a short verbal communication to be understood differently than it was intended. But in this post, we are getting the recipient's interpretation of the intent. It appears to me, (also a biased source) that this recipient is very sensitive to perceived aggression and insults. There's some analysis and speculation based on their perceptions, that seems to take it as given that intents were correctly understood. From my reading, this is very much in question. I didn't have the benefit of hearing tone of voice and understanding full context. But in their written form most of the lines categorized here as aggressive would have been categorized differently by some other unicycle rider. Specifically, I'm thinking of me. Full disclosure, I don't know how to unicycle.
What I'm proposing, as a man, is that he mis-interpreted them.
So IMO if any adult doesn’t respond with a smile (at least on the inside … be honest with yourself) then they’ve lost their inner child … and isn’t that a bit sad?
Disclaimer: I have a unicycle and am a terrible terrible rider. Don’t care. Gotta hit the sidewalk once in a while to refresh and damn if I don’t end up giggling every time I fall.
Margret Atwood
> The quote is usually presented as inherently true, capturing the asymmetrical nature of the neverending war between the sexes. And I think that aspect is basically correct. But, if you’ll forgive me for being a pedantic male, it’s incomplete. Yes, men are afraid women will laugh at them; yes, women are afraid men will kill them. But do you know what else men are afraid of?
> Men.
> Men are also afraid other men will kill them.
https://verydistantlands.substack.com/p/the-eraserhead-guide...
TFA fits the pattern. Men feel the need to quickly establish a hierarchy with a modest putdown.
Or maybe you are just lucky to be born in a country with relative good security? Sometimes doing groceries can expose you to a situation like this, and sometimes it is hard to move to a better country.
Strange, cuz Marylin Monroe told me "if you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything."
So maybe men are just constantly calibrating a competitive sense of humor..?
It's interesting how many people feel free to say the damnedest things when they see someone doing something they don't understand.
Also, I don't care about what they say. If you don't have a thick skin and the capacity to shake off random comments from strangers, you won't do something unusual that attracts that kind of attention for > 10 years
If you don't have a thick skin, you also probably wouldn't be running barefoot.
(sorry, my androgen-induced aggression got the better of me)
For example, the snow and ice melted here yesterday, exposing gravel on asphalt which is borderline painful to run on directly. Also, e.g. very cold winter days or just nasty gravel roads may inflict varying degrees of pain.
Otherwise, it can also be slightly painful for the soles during later parts of long runs, especially when inexperienced or when running for the first time in months.
Likewise, a group of business men in suites are less likely to engage in this behavior. It's impossible for the unicyclist to measure people's class standing but you can get a lot of context clues by their appearance and behavior. Maybe it includes some bias, but for the purpose of logging all interesting responses I thought it was approximate enough.
Bro if you're trying to count those responses by class you can't use those same responses to put them into the bins in the first place, and reproducing a classist stereotype for no reason doesn't make the point any more valid.
Social and ethnic differences seemed to soften the male response, and such a softening was also noted when unicycling in Framlingham, a small Suffolk town to which I had moved from Newcastle.
If the film Jaws was set in North-East England:
Edit: we talking about this article a bit; she reports older men (40+! we do eventually learn) have a clue about how to start a conversation with an attractive woman ("that looks elegant", "how old is your horse?", etc.) so I told her how my grandmother told me inappropriate male attention at school came in the form of dipping her pigtails in inkwells.
I don't get that quip. Is the joker implying that they see horses as food animals? (Yes, I know that some places like France do sometimes eat horse, but it isn't common in English-speaking countries at least).
(fwiw, restaurants here must label the origin of their meat products, and more often than not horse meat comes from North America!)
I can ride a unicycle and rode it more often as a teenager. Lots of comments about getting lost from the circus. But they were meant to be funny. I think.
I guess a tandem isn’t as uncommon / funny as a unicycle.
My experience is that greatest predictor of what kind of response you get when doing something unusual in public is whether or not the activity is solitary. If you do a solitary activity that takes a lot of practice, it suggests you're some kind of weirdo loner who has to fill the empty days with hobbies because no one wants to hang out with you, and responses in public may reflect that.
If you're doing an activity with someone else, then at least one person doesn't think you're an intolerable weirdo, so people seem to be more accepting of it.
The responses I got between when I was juggling alone versus club passing with another person in a park were very different.
Now I’m curious how the reactions would be for a tandem recumbent tricycle. (Yes, they’re a thing.)
Indirect put-downs:
“You must like living dangerously”
“Odd things you find on cycles”
“And what were your other birthday presents?”
“Is it a new form of transport then?”
“I suppose it saves on tyres”
“You park your bike for two minutes and that’s what you are left with”fortysomething able-bodied man, but i suspect fear of collision would be my first reaction too. unicycles look hard to control and liable to crash into things, based on instincts developed riding bicycles. (i would also think it was a neat thing to do, though)
And let's be honest, a unicycle is pretty amusing. My first impulse would be to make a joke.
Lastly, I'm not at all surprised that women, seeing a man performing a significant act of physical agility, might have some positive emotional reaction.
I'm most impressed by the systematic way the OP collected the statistics!
Is there any other way to interpret it? (Genuinely asking!)
I kind of associate these types of failed jokes with a particular type of awkward middle aged-to-older dude who accidentally puts people down when trying to be funny.
Ten seconds after saying it, my more considerate thought process will probably realize that the joke wasn't very funny, that the rider probably hears the same "joke" a hundred times per day, and that they might have just been enjoying their solitary unicycling hobby, rather than deliberately putting on a show to amuse the neighbourhood. But by that time they'll have long since passed by, and it would be too awkward to catch up and apologize.
Unycicling is easy to put down, but take the message above about running barefoot.
Seeing someone doing something unusual like that, something that people "just don't understand" leads to uncertainty. "Why I don't do that?", "Why I can't do that?"
And since as men we're culturally primed to rubuff such doubts, the response is ridicule: "Because he looks silly, and I'm smarter than him", "Bet he'll get scared if I stomp", etc.
People are so insecure sometimes
When I first learned, I setup a couple large garbage bins several feet apart, and just tried to get from one to the other, using the bins to keep up / turn around / go back. As you improve, move the bins farther apart, and rinse / repeat until you’ve got it.
The electric felt a lot more dangerous to learn. I practiced going back and forth in a hallway (holding the wall), then practiced riding freely and turning in a parking lot, then started riding around my neighborhood.
It is dangerous, though. One wheel in contact with the ground, people don't know how to react to you, plus high speeds and poorly maintained roads mean a mistake by you or another person can mean a hospital trip with serious injuries. I think the risk is easily 10x or more than what it is to ride a bike around.
You generally have a fixed wheel on a unicycle. That would make derailleur gears harder to implement as they'd normally work with a freehub of some kind.
Hub gears like a Sturmey-Archer generally need to zero torque going through them to change gear. Again that's hard to do when you're using the forward and backward pedalling to balance.
(in the US) The one constant was that overwhelmingly older men and women were interested and impressed and had genuine questions or compliments without making jokes.
The younger you got with males, the more aggressive and posturing the questions and behavior. Younger females were non-memorable - mainly just looked or ignored. Pre-teen, kids of both genders are just curious.
There's a definite similarity in the behaviors of people as they get older and the very young in how they approach new and interesting things like a (e)unicycle. As people get older they seemed to lose all need to posture and prove themselves and they seemed more comfortable exposing the vulnerability of being curious and ignorant.
Men absolutely love to ask the cost.
Typically when people marvel at my wheel, I tell them if they give me a few bowling pins I can juggle as well.
Never a bad word, but I don't ride it like I'm an A-hole bicyclist.
Your experience differs markedly from the authors ... are you claiming they are an "A-hole bicyclist"?
She got lots of attention, but only rarely talked about getting negative comments. (But she's not the type who would rate "I suppose it saves on tyres" as a put-down).
Seemed a little overly-defensive/uncharitable wrt the banter from men, most of them didn't seem snide or negative but perhaps you had to be there...
This is funny because (just in case you didn't know) unicycles don't (generally) have brakes - you slow down by putting the pressure on backwards on the pedals.
"Nice purse."
lol... testosterone? or perhaps testosterone combined with thousands of years of "wolf pack" evolution where one has to prod and disrupt to find "their place" in the pecking order?
The dog-eat-dog approach appears to have evolved including the same major hormone balance among various species such as canines and humans, you could say it is like aggression and pecking order "on steroids".
But the steroids were always there, it's more like the steroids are being leveraged by the craftiness of the species in an evolutionary biological way.
Resulting in the humans ending up much more evolved when they want to be.
Anyway, from that neutral root a completely different offshoot could independently have spent the same millennia evolving in the complete opposite direction, away from as much resemblance to a canine hierarchy as evolution would allow.
Such disparate cultures may or may not have interacted, clashed or have their decendants coexist today. Nobody would ever know after all this time but among men, maybe some will culturally trend more toward the influence of testosterone in a competitive way when encountering others regardless of whether they are males or females. The male-male competition the most prominent.
While others will be just the opposite and be highly influenced in a co-operative way when encountering others whether male or female. The male-female co-operation the most prominent.
IOW for some men their testosterone is primarily involved in relating to other males without as much consideration for females, other men their testosterone is primarily involved in relating to females without as much consideration for other males. And everything in between.
If any one culture were to become dominant enough, that would make any other one an outlier.
this is a particularly hilarious comment imo
>> Competing interests: None, apart from owning a bicycle as well as a unicycle.
Interestingly few others seem to take much note.
I wouldn't say that, though. I just smile. I've seen unicycles before.
I practice balance on the Bosu. I've only ever actually fallen once. Usually I can just step off, no harm.
There were all kinds of cool things going on on the mountain. The "d Salute guy", longboarders driving up in a turtle van and riding down, mountain bikers like me riding down, paragliders (I even had a prof who did it!), and yes, a guy who rode a unicycle down the single track trail. Amazing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/19eih...
Mostly male onlookers observe a man boarding an electric unicycle with 30 pizzas.
I’m surprised how this "research" ended up on a government funded website.
Or maybe I’m not.
A father, to his ~4yo son: "Look, the man rides on one wheel!"
Son: "Daad, this is a U-NI-CYCLE!"
I'm not an academic, so I'm curious, are papers like this just for fun or are they intended to actually contribute to our understanding of the world? Because I can't help but think that the methodology in the paper is dubious. Do we just the guy because he is a professor? I suppose ideally the reputation system is such that if it is revealed someone is just making things up they'll get booted out.
Not trying to hate on it, it was just an odd paper so it had me wondering.
[...]
> because he is a professor
Ding ding, we have a winner!
(EDIT: to clarify, I'm not being snarky, if you've spent your adult life contributing to a certain class of publication [which happen to be those indexed by PubMed] perhaps it becomes second nature)
The Christmas issue has been critiqued for exactly the reason you made this comment - indexers don’t pickup on the differences of the Christmas edition making it functionally invisible if you see it in pumped unless you know about it
[0] https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&q=bmj...
1. Introduce novel stimulus
2. Observe response
3. Hypothesize about cause
So much of the statistical significance and p-values and citations is oppressive bureaucracy at best, cargo cult busywork at worst. This is the good stuff.
Other commenters have pointed out that this is basically a parody article, which is the only way it makes sense. But that means anyone who thinks it represents the pinnacle of science has eaten the onion and needs to reevaluate their criteria for scientific work.
First is that some people, statically male, are simply aggressive, and looking for a target, and that target doesn't matter.
Alternatively, I suspect some amount of aggression is the result of perceived attention seeking behavior. Attention seeking behavior is a common adversarial action when competing for mates and social status. I suspect that unicycling taps in to this.
I have thoughts on this as well. Are women not looking for a target or do they need a less physically challenging target? Girls' bullying certainly seems to exist. A single woman can't feel reel confident picking a fight with a guy, even 2-3 women can't be confident if things escalate.
Most of us can think of that woman who -- backed up by men -- finds her aggressive voice.
Males compete with other males, not females for mating and offspring. Other males are competitors and threats in the way that females are not.
Women compete with other women, but the stakes are lower. Males can impregnate multiple females in a short period, while multiple males can not share the the same female to the same degree.
At a simple biological level, women can co-exist, and men can't. Not to say men don't make it work, but it's swimming uphill.
They also contribute to path wear since they allow people who have no business being on the tails due to lack of fitness to use them.
Also holy shit, the potholes from eBike riders more or less burning out from standing or trying to go up slopes they are unable to. Fuck eBike riders on trails.
Sure, occasionally I pull a max-speed segment for hoots, but I don't do it anywhere near anyone who might be scared or injured if I mess up. My trail empties out pretty nicely once you're about 5 miles from "downtown" (of the city along the trail where I enter) so it's easy to find long open stretches to hoon around if you want without endangering anyone but yourself and others on your ride.
I have just under 1000 miles of riding on this particular ebike, and about 2500 miles total, so I'm definitely not an expert rider, but I have _some_ handling skills.
Personally I like the relatively unregulated hardware. I don't need my bike to decide on a safe top speed or power. That's up to me. If I am on the trail around people, I keep it below 15 mph as a rule of thumb. If I'm doing a segment on a road trying to dodge a half-awake car driver, I very much want to be able to pull up to 30 mph fast so I can GTFO from a bad situation.
If you don't like jackwagons riding on the trail, regulate that behavior, not their hardware. Just my 2¢, opinions may vary.
There is simply no reason electric bikes should have the continuous power of two world class pro cyclists in one. It's nice to appeal to people acting sensibly, but of course that doesn't work - not least because the majority of people riding these don't even realize it is not normal to go up 10% grades at 15mph and more
If the story here is we want people to ride that otherwise can't - 250W continuous reliably puts you in the 90th percentile. That is an all out effort for a good half of the population.
Yikes. you wanna rephrase that?
As with eBikes, just about anyone could strap on a SCUBA and visit places they otherwise couldn’t (IMO shouldn’t).
The fact is, some people are unfit. Whether, physically, or simply lack the ability to be a good steward of public resources. This applies to SCUBA, eBikes, Driving and a bunch of other things. I don’t think that’s objectionable.
In short, if you want your cities bike infrastructure to get better... encourage the city to embrace point-to-point scooter/bike rentals.
adjective Having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful.
malice noun 1. A desire to harm others or to see others suffer; extreme ill will or spite. 2. The intent to commit an unlawful act without justification or excuse. 3. An improper motive for an action, such as desire to cause injury to another.
If you let your behaviour be defined by the most sensitive and high σ recipients, you cease to be able to conduct any form of communication apart from talking about the weather. And that might even offend some people then.
In the last 2 years of riding bikes and walking the dog, my two closest calls with cars have been on the sidewalk during walkies.
Getting angry when someone cuts you off is different to being angry about cyclists just existing.
personally i just cycle on footpaths, i'm not really interested in what the law says. me getting hit by a car is a much more dangerous and likely situation than me riding into a pedestrian, and police aren't going to abandon their car on the road to chase me on foot.
I don't like some cyclists because of their blatant and unsafe disregard for the rules.
It's not uncommon to see:
- Cyclists ignoring red lights
- Cyclists ignoring stop signs
- Cyclists riding on a busy sidewalk
- Cyclists yelling at pedestrians to move rather than stopping at an intersection as required
- Cyclists taking up the entire lane and not permitting cars to pass
- Cyclists going the wrong way down a one-way street
Some of the worst offenders are e-bike users, who can move very fast and in unexpected ways. It's no fun to have someone silently fly by you from behind, inches away, at 20mph while they are riding what's basically a motorcycle on the sidewalk.
I frequently walk in the city, and scooters/bicycles are far more of a hazard than cars. They often can't decide whether they want to be pedestrians or cars, and they often don't follow the rules for either, putting everyone (including themselves) at risk.
This is explicitly permitted in most places and is often the only safe thing to do. In a situation like that, if you can't overtake such a bike (or car, or tractor) safely, you must wait until it is safe. The bike (or car or tractor) has the right to the entire lane.
First search result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuhblb_9qec
"mounting the pavement" temporarily isn't the same as driving on it for multiple metres.
If you claim never to have seen that happen, then you must live in a hugely law abiding place. I live in a small town with a pretty old average age, and I see this regularly here. In London it was worse. Maybe as a cyclist you look out for these things more, or maybe you just get to see them more due to your positioning.
No they're not, because they carry an order of magnitude less kinetic energy.
> Cyclists taking up the entire lane and not permitting cars to pass
as they fucking should, this is the safest thing to do, you're in a metal box and if I let you pass you'll do it too fast and too close
> Cyclists ignoring red lights > Cyclists ignoring stop signs
In civilized places bikes are explicitly allowed to treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yields.
> No they're not, because they carry an order of magnitude less kinetic energy.
Yeah, go ahead and tell them that after they hit you on the sidewalk or going the wrong way down a one-way street.
I'm not sure if this is serious, but it's one of the more obviously false claims I've seen on Hacker News:
https://everytownresearch.org/reports-of-road-rage-shootings...
>Experiencing aggressive driving on the road is not uncommon—roughly eight in 10 drivers surveyed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reported having at least one incident in the month before the survey.
In response to your other comment:
>angry about cyclists just existing.
I don't think these people are angry at cyclists per se at all, they're angry about a perceived anti-car sociopolitical shift, and cyclists are just a visible artifact of that.
Believe me, people ARE angry at cyclists - it might be for the reasons you suggest, but their anger is directed at the humans on the bikes.
That was about 5 minutes of time out of a two hour peak period - I'd be amazed if you didn't get several hundred an hour if you sat there and counted. There are, alas, no cameras on this junction - probably because MetPol would be doing nothing but processing these violations 24/7...
It strikes me as insane that road with so much pedestrian traffic, lined with shops, in a part of London where only something like 30% of the population drives, has so few provisions for pedestrian or cycle safely. With pavements barely wide enough for walking, covered in obstructions, and road markings that looks more like an IQ test, than anything helpful.
Exactly that one, yes.
> I avoid going near Old Kent road in anything except a car
Yeah, I used to cycle it a fair bit 10-15 years ago but I wouldn't bother these days either (plus there are decent cycleway options for avoiding it.)
Edit since you edited yourself (only their first sentence was in the comment when I first replied):
> The fact that even those who don't drive cars hate cyclists says something. As a pedestrian I see myself much more endangered by cyclists, which swerve everywhere (including the pavement), than by cars, which stay within their lanes.
I've only seen swerving cyclists everywhere when infrastructure for cycling is poor or non-existent. Anywhere where there's a minimally decent infrastructure I don't see cyclists sharing space with pedestrians on sidewalks, nor swerving crazily around.
Maybe it's an issue with not providing appropriate infrastructure instead? If there weren't roads you'd see cars not following lanes, etc.
This is simply how cyclists behave in the absence of incentives to act otherwise.
You don't solve this problem by having more infrastructure, you solve this problem by brainwashing the cyclists and drivers to follow the rules, and enforcing the rules.
Car people see anything 'weird' and just lose their minds to the point that killing another human is an acceptable outcome to them. It's extremely reliable. Get a bike and you will find out exactly how many psychopaths are out there.
EDIT: I make it a point of honour to try to stick to the Highway Code whether on my bike or in my car. Still random drivers harass me when I'm on my bike.
I had someone lean out of a car and try to put a plastic bag over my head when I was cycling once. I would love to hear what I was supposed to have done to justify that.
You just have to look at how the press drone on about "lycra clad louts". There's an obsession with identifying us by what we wear as a justification for violence.
That's not hurt feelings but actual broken bones and blood violence.
Off the top of my head I can think of several newspaper articles calling for barbed wire to be strung across cyclepaths in the UK (Hahaha, joking of course!) and reports where that happened and someone was seriously injured. All in the same paper (Hahaha, no connection obviously!)
YouTube is full of people in cars attacking cyclists and it's got fuck all to do with breaking traffic regulations.
Not excusing the other crazy stuff you've put up with. That's insane.
Not sure why that would make me difficult to drive around. If I'm on a motorway I overtake and when I've finished my manoeuvre and I just move over again.
If I see an amber light then I do what the Highway code suggests and stop if doing so won't cause a problem. If I see a red light definitely stop.
Many drivers imagine that bicycles are not permitted in roads and some take it upon themselves to make my life dangerous in an effort to enforce that.
Now I think about it, I'm in doubt if you actually categorized cyclists training on open roads as participating in sports? Swap out "cyclists" with "car enthusiasts". That's nonsense.
ETA: I'm a cyclist myself.
- a game, competition, or activity needing physical effort and skill that is played or done according to rules, for enjoyment and/or as a job
- all types of physical activity that people do to keep healthy or for enjoyment
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sport
I cycle purely for transportation, because it’s cheaper and faster than the alternatives. I certainly don’t compete while cycling to work, and don’t cycle for enjoyment or to keep healthy. It certainly hasn’t kept me healthy give a driver seriously injured while cycling to work, hospitalised me for week, fractured multiple vertebrae making me unable to exercise for 2 months, and resulted in my taking 3 months off work to deal with the injuries and trauma.
So yeah, there’s plenty of people out there that cycle in a manner that doesn’t meet your dictionary definition of a sport.
Road cyclists training on the road train their skills, how? I see no difference in me riding on the road versus Jonas Vingegaard in the "training skill department". Nah, it is recreation or transport in my opinion. Not a sport. The problem is exactly that: When road cyclists think they are doing sports on an open road, they create problems which often end in road rage and sometimes in deaths. The cycling community needs to look inward. They behave like the rotten part of motorcycling.
I stopped riding with other cyclists and motorcyclist for this reason. They are a danger to themselves and each other.
In Brazil and the USA quite often I experienced aggressive drivers when cycling, actively driving closer to me on a bike while shouting to get off the road, and twice in São Paulo I got hit by a car purposefully (waiting for traffic lights and got bumped from behind by a car once, cycling uphill and a car passed me and swerved onto my side on another).
While in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands I never experienced a single aggressive driver when cycling. In Germany I had a couple of drivers shouting at me in Berlin but given it's Berlin I can't generalise if German drivers are more adversarial against cyclists, it's a very car-centric culture though so I guess it will correlate.
Just some anecdotes, unsure how much of a pattern it is, would be interesting to compare with other people in car-heavy cultures (Australia perhaps?).
My theories about this:
* A cyclist forces the driver to go out of 'auto pilot' and actively think about driving for a few seconds, which annoys people disproportionately
* Cyclists represent a sort of 'others' that we project all kinds of negative feelings on.
* Cycling for transportation in North America is only recently taken seriously and this can be used to blame them for any kind of new societal changes that are perceived negatively (liberalism, inflation, political correctness, higher taxes).
Early years: No reaction
Inquisitive 5-12 year olds: No reaction
Adolescent boys: 1x "Nice bike", 1x trying to race me while doing a wheelie (but no verbal response)
Adult women: No reaction
Adult men: 1x started exchanging nods with me after passing each other going in opposite directions daily for ~3 years (but no verbal response)
After 5 years of 3-season daily commuting in the midwestern US, I can report 2 instances of being struck by side mirrors, one instance where the driver matched speed and pushed me off the road and off the shoulder into the ditch before speeding away, 4 times getting hit by thrown beer cans or other trash, twice had tires chirp when someone on their phone noticed me only at the last second, 3 times someone in a diesel has stood on the brake and accelerator simultaneously to "rolled coal" on me, and I've received more middle fingers and curses of the general form "Get off the road, asshole/fucker/idiot!" than I can count.
The other big danger is a lot of new or timid drivers are afraid to cross the center line even in passing zones, and instead of giving the legally mandated 3 feet outside town/5 feet in city limits, will try to pass very slowly in the same lane. This causes a line of traffic on the 35 MPH (nominally ~55 km/h, actually driven at ~45mph/70kph) street, which provokes the drivers caught in the line.
The more physical assaults went down significantly after I mounted a highly-visible action camera on top of my helmet, but verbal assaults seemed to go up.
I think most of it comes from shockingly dangerous behavior, which I am concerned will blowback on me.
I've seen cyclists in the freeway slow lane, cut across 8 lanes of busy traffic, and they seem to love windiest roads with hairpin turns and no visibility. Perhaps most brazenly, in the middle lane of 65 mile road, in black at night, with no reflectors.
What I have seen, often, is drivers on residential or downtown streets bearing down on law-abiding cyclists with murderous aggression for no apparent reason than simply having to share the road. General statements like yours kind of support the notion that many drivers who have had a crazy experience with a poor cyclist feel justified in taking out the anger from that experience on any and all cyclists.
While I don't take out mt anger on random bikers, I agree that 'sharing' is a common origin. Many roads are simply not practical or safe to share with bikes.
If each had all the roads they could want, and didnt have to share, then I dont think either would care about the other.
Reality is that they do have to share, it isn't safe or convenient, and therefore people get angry.
Every thread about cyclists being abused includes someone like you mentioning that some cyclists ignore stops with the implication that they started the whole fight or that the fight is justified.
Agreed that cars are way more dangerous than bikes, but here in California I do see a lot of aggressive recreational cyclists that act like they have a chip on their shoulder. While they may not be a danger by crashing into things like cars do, their behavior does cause sometimes dangerous issues for other people on the road.
No one should be throwing things or trying to hurt anyone, but it absolutely is past and repeated negative experiences with cyclists acting irresponsibly that make drivers resent them, just like careless assholes in cars can make cyclists resent drivers.
My belief is that the worst offending car drivers are simply psychopath bullies who know they can safely abuse, threaten, harass, assault, etc. those pansy spandex wearing cyclists. They do it because they enjoy it.
Some people are simply not fit to be a part of society.
I never equated the two. I used them as an example of how people come to blame all members of a certain class for the consistently harmful actions of a few members of that class. It's not fair, but it's common.
> Being delayed by a few seconds generally only results in aggression from car drivers if and only if the cause is a cyclist.
"Being delayed by a few seconds" is annoying for everyone no matter what the cause. That's not really the problem drivers have with cyclists though. It's having to slam on their breaks because someone on a bike ran a red light or having to swerve to avoid a cyclist who suddenly and illegally darted into their lane that makes drivers upset.
> My belief is that the worst offending car drivers are simply psychopath bullies
Maybe a number of the most extreme offenders actually are? The majority of people who have problems with cyclists on the road however are certainly not. I'd agree that people abusing cyclists for "fun" really are a problem and that they shouldn't be on the road.
Sometimes I don't have to be in the crosswalk to notice them, because they'll take an electric-powered cycle onto the sidewalk.
I am not exaggerating. I pay attention when I see a bicyclist actually stopping so I can cross in the crosswalk when I have the light, or otherwise following the rules of the road. I wish I had the presence of mine to thank those cyclists. But they are rare.
That doesn't seem fair, that is not what I said. You're misrepresenting me. I do not know if you intended to or not.
A group is generally regarded based on the behavior of a very small minority of its membership, usually the very worst or the very best. This seems like general human nature. There are many examples of this if you care to look for them. I have a few examples in mind, but they are unfortunately politically-charged examples and I have no desire to bring politics into this more than I just did.
Here's the thing: people WILL literally try to run you off the road, even when you're the most careful law-abiding cyclists that exists. I've had people try to run me off the road even though it was a dedicated cycle path, only to proceed to rant at me that it was all a waste of money. Even standing still at a traffic light will have people drive up way close up to your rear wheel and you look back and they shout "piss off you cunt". The amount of aggression from some is unhinged beyond proportions.
So when people come back with "yeah, but some cyclists break rules" ... Well sure, but that kind of misses the point. You get aggression even when following the rules not doing anything.
Not counted in that kind of data are all the times drives are forced to swerve or slam on their brakes to avoid accidents. The fact that cyclists are harder to see than trucks and SUVs make them even more of a danger to drivers because they can come out of nowhere from directions drivers would never expect traffic to come from and by the time they are visible it may be too late.
I can't say if bikes are more of a danger than trucks but I can absolutely say that they are often a danger to drivers.
The very assertion that they "come out of nowhere" speaks to the visibility problems inherent to driving a veritable locomotive down a city street. Yesterday, I witnessed a truck going around a curve on hop up on the curb and drive down the sidewalk briefly. This was at ~55 mph, and upon swerving and dropping the wheel back down into the road the truck wobbled and barely managed to miss the other cars in the road; a bike nearby, even on the sidewalk, would not have had a chance. Imagine being on that sidewalk; how's that for coming out of nowhere?
If there is any world in which a cyclist poses more danger to a truck, we're certainly not living in it.
Cyclists are just as bad as drivers when it comes to contemplating The Other.
"They're talking mess at the poor benighted car havers" isn't going to fly. (Signed, a car haver who walks ~five miles a day; you are all full of sin.)
It seems pretty logical to assume to me that you'd almost always have fewer ped fatalities if more people were biking instead of driving.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/killer...
The original context was shared country trails; I guess your comment was due to a misreading rather than intentional goalpost-moving but the way those arguing for cyclists seem to leap immediately to deny all and any misdemeanours and bridle at any criticism doesn't help good faith discussions.
Suggesting it was to justify aggression and violence towards anybody is bad faith at best, a lie at worst. Please don't use such tactics here, and certainly not with me.
Of course n=1, my experiences may not be representative, etc.
(Dogs vs cats is bad too)
Unicycling is nothing extraordinary that would deserve prize, pizza delivery guys do that all the time. I live in busy tourist city and I am very tired of inconsiderate unicycling drivers!
Different reaction from men can be explained in what would follow in case of crash. Men get far less help when injured. And if driver gets injured, men are expected to step up and provide help!
I can't imagine delivering food on a regular unicycle - it's a lot of work.
The linked article was from 2007. He was definitely talking about a regular unicycle, and I doubt speed was a factor. The "unsafe" perception from others would be from the inherent wobbling associated with someone learning how to ride - it takes a while to get really smooth.
And why would you put "unsafe" into quotes? Person who falls from unicycle is heavy, and can injure themselfs or another person.
The unicycle can be considered something impractical and suboptimal almost uniformly. You can't go fast, you can't carry anything, there's no way to give a friend a ride. It is perhaps equivalent to a person not developing their body in a way that makes them a useful citizen/comrade/etc.
The response from men seems to mainly line up with how we'd react to such a thing in evolutionary context. We instinctively realize that unicycle ridding isn't a value-add to either the rider or society - both are less capable than when a more "appropriate" vehicle is used (we have "standardized" on bikes rather than uni-cyclers or trikes because those are clearly superior across almost all non-circus applications.)
Men react as they do because intrinsically we want society and its members to be stronger - as we shoulder the load of those who aren't. So there's sort of a "hope" that enough of these remarks will encourage the person to get their shit together.
Women are more focused on comfort - so they react the way they would to seeing someone physically weak and less capable than the average person - with kindness and almost a pity. I don't think they are lining up to sleep with him.
Obviously these are not exactly "helpful" reactions to someone riding a unicycle around the park but the underlying drives are still roughly right. A nation of unicycle riders is going to get conquered.
This comment is obviously completely braindead, but I did want to jump in and say that I would rather have a unicycling, gun-toting comrade backing me up than one riding a road bike.
Putting a lot of time and effort into learning something difficult, but that isn't directly useful for survival, is a form of status signaling. Hence the stereotype of successful artists and musicians and athletes having countless fawning admirers while considerably fewer people are thought to be throwing themselves at accountants and teachers and farmers.
Unicycling is interesting because you could just be going about your day getting from point A to point B, while a hostile audience sees both conspicuous consumption ("I have so much free time that I can learn to unicycle") and conspicuous outrage ("I'm so secure in my status that I can do something nonconformist that maybe also looks kind of silly"), and feels like they have to take you down a notch.