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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Where would you want cyclists to go exactly? Sidewalks filled with pedestrians? Not every road has a cycling path.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656153 "A bicycle superhighway was the future of transit"

By foot? By car? By bus? "Cyclist" isn't a race or religion. He's not telling them "to go" anywhere. He's saying that if you choose to use a mode of transport that is a hazard and nuisance to others, you are in a glass house and shouldn't be throwing stones.

A cyclist isn't a hazard to an autoist. Maybe to the paint on their two-ton vehicle, but not to them bodily.

They are a hazard because drivers need to take actions to avoid them. It turns the road into an obstacle course, except with unpredictable obstacles that rarely follow traffic rules like red lights.

I spend a lot of time on the road, and I see autoists running red lights far more frequently than cyclists. Cyclists are at a lot greater risk getting out into any intersection, it'd be suicide (literally) to put ourselves into the path of oncoming traffic.

I do see this remark ("you dumb kids on your bikes break all the traffic laws!!") on all the web forums for the local newspaper, whenever any article comes along about bike lanes or whatever. I just don't see people on bikes breaking traffic laws anywhere near as often as people in cars.

As for needing to avoid things, would you call traffic circles or pedestrians a "hazard" as well? Again, you're in a two-ton metal box, none of this stuff is going to do anything more than scratch your paint.

If your roads are an obstacle course then it sounds like they shouldn't have cars on because they're clearly not wide enough. That's endangering the lives of all traffic, not just cyclists.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of people drivers kill in Europe and North America every year, they're the hazard.

If you want cyclists off roads, lobby to change the law.

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