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To: Melas
If you don’t mind my asking, why are people who ride bicycles morons, and why do you hate them?

Morons they are or not I don't know, but there is an easy way to develop a dislike for bicyclists. Here is how.

Buy a house that sits on a narrow 2-lane road that is several miles long. Add a misfortune of that road being well paved, scenic and twisted. Now try to get to or from your home. You will find that bicyclists are riding on that road, and since the road is twisting and the visibility is limited you can't pass them safely. You basically have two options: you either wait for a long time for a good moment to pass, or you risk your life and lives of others.

Other situations involve city roads. You are in the right lane. There are bicycles in that lane, but you can't share the lane safely. The road is packed. What options do you have?

In other words, bicycles aren't capable of keeping up with traffic. As result, they are a hazard. Many bicyclists are killed, so the danger is there. Car drivers have to find ways to drive around such obstacles; such maneuvers are statistically dangerous. Lack of lane width forces drivers to pass bicycles too close for comfort.

So the mutual dislike between car drivers and the bicycle riders is largely caused by the obvious fact that they can't share the road. It's not a matter of diversity training, it's a matter of physics and geometry. A bicycle needs at least half the lane to be passed safely, which means that the car driver has to take half of the opposite lane to pass. Sometimes he does that where passing is not allowed. If an accident happens, who gets blamed - the car driver who made the hasty decision or the bicycle rider who created the situation in the first place?

Yet another aspect of this issue is in fact that a lot of that bicycling is completely optional. In essence, bicyclists use the public road as their personal gym and their personal sighseeing location. You may want to get home ASAP but get stuck behind a bicyclist who just takes his sweet time and enjoys the ride. You, on the other hand, enjoy nothing - you have a job to do, a place to get to, etc. Bicyclists are not singled out as such problems; car drivers will not like any vehicle that is disrupting the flow of traffic; but if it is a farm vehicle you at least know that the farmer has to drive it, he has a need, and he is using his right for the road not to annoy you but because some field needs work. There is no such purpose for most bicyclists - people in spandex ride because they like riding. Illegal Mexicans on bikes gather more respect in this sense - they ride a bike because that's all they have; it's not something they choose to do for fun.

I'm sure bicyclists would be similarly annoyed if dog walkers and octomoms are using bike paths to walk their dogs and children. Pedestrians would be likewise annoyed if large tortouses are randomly crawling on sidewalks. People like order in their lives; seeing a bicycle ahead of you is a small disruption of that order.

18 posted on 07/12/2011 1:21:27 AM PDT by Greysard
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To: Greysard

Excellent!


20 posted on 07/12/2011 3:35:26 AM PDT by Ghost of Philip Marlowe (Prepare for survival.)
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To: Greysard

Not to mention that all bicyclists insist that it’s only a few bad apples that pass all stopped traffic at stop lights and cut to the head of the line causing vehicles to have to pass them all over again. But we do know better. I’ll keep it clean here, but basically, road bicyclists are morons, plain and simple. What serious, intelligent person would insist on 100 bicyle club riders to meet on a Tuesday afternoon at 5pm to have a group ride around town? Idiots...


21 posted on 07/12/2011 4:21:18 AM PDT by Hatteras
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To: Greysard

So roads were made only for you. So they are your personal property and you are the only one who should be able to use them. I understand.


27 posted on 07/12/2011 11:35:10 AM PDT by John D
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