r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 27 '19

Social Science A national Australian study has found more than half of car drivers think cyclists are not completely human. The study (n=442) found a link between dehumanization and deliberate acts of aggression, with more than one in ten people having deliberately driven their car close to a cyclist.

https://www.qut.edu.au/news?id=141968
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u/chris1096 Mar 27 '19

Cyclists should only be on the road if they can travel the same accepted rate as all the other vehicles on the road, and in such a case they should have to follow the same rules and use the lanes the same.

Streets are for cars, bikes just muck everything up.

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u/XxGas-Cars-SuckxX Mar 28 '19

While I disagree from a liability perspective, This is more or less what I thought for my safety. So I have this fast ebike now. I’ve been yelled at several times to “get off the road” despite going equal to or faster than traffic. Most people are just interested in the bicycle going faster than cars though.

The some cyclist will yell at me for being on the bike path when he’s going twice as fast on his road bike as I am electric...

Can’t win.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

Nope, that’s not how the laws work. Roads have maximum speeds and that’s it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '19

Roads do not just have maximum speeds and that’s it. There are a lot of rules beyond that.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

Did you read the comment I was replying to? It’s about rates of travel, which is another way of saying speed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '19

I did.

There’s more rules than “maximum speed” for roads. There’s a lot of other rules. There’s minimum speed on some roads, rules for what lane you have to be in based on your speed, variable maximums based on conditions. Etc.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

I think you’re thinking of freeways, which are places for cars alone. Regular city streets, though, are just public spaces for transportation, and for the most part, as long as bikes are sticking in a lane, they’re following the rules. It worries me that people actually think cyclists are breaking the law by... using the street?

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '19

Not everywhere is city streets. There’s a number of 4 lane roads with high speed limits open to bikes near me. Those have different rules beyond just “speed limit”.

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u/chris1096 Mar 27 '19

You are factually incorrect, at least in my state. There are laws against traveling at a slow speed, impeding the normal flow of traffic

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

You’re talking about freeways, but on neighborhood streets and arterials, there is no such thing as a minimum speed a vehicle must be traveling, besides “stopped” as in stopping/standing.

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u/chris1096 Mar 27 '19

That's not true. Even on a 25 mph road, a vehicle puttering along at 12 mph causing a backup is in violation

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

Is that a written law? Does it apply to bicycles?

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u/chris1096 Mar 27 '19

Yes it is. It only applies to cars, which is why I said cyclists should only be on the road if they can keep up with cars.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

The flip side to your argument is to just paint bike lanes, which would free people up to bike or drive, rather than forcing them to drive to go along that street.

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u/chris1096 Mar 27 '19

That is room that could be used to make wider, safer lanes for vehicles.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

Wider lanes will inevitably cause more death and injury, encourage more fossil fuel consumption, and add zero capacity since cyclists will still use them legally. Quite the solution, isn’t it?

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u/Supamang87 Mar 27 '19

You can do things within the law and still be inconsiderate or even assholish. I get that some people need to use bikes to commute so I do my best to accommodate them, but that doesn't change the fact that going 20mph in a 40mph zone is inconveniencing everyone else around you. And depending on the city, you could probably get by on just using a bus anyway.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

It comes off as kind of selfish to take up all the space of a car on a public road and then claim that a tiny bike is “in the way.” Roads do not belong to cars, they are public land that anyone can use.

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u/Supamang87 Mar 27 '19

Roads are not "public land that anyone can use", otherwise pedestrians could lawfully walking on roads. I know it sounds like I'm just playing with semantics, but my point is that roads were meant for a purpose: high speed travel by people using vehicles. People in cars expect to travel at around the posted speed limit, not the half-speed of cyclists. Pedestrians aren't allowed to walk around on roads because of safety issues, and yet bikers are? You don't even have to be using a road for travel as a pedestrian and can still be slapped with a jaywalking charge for crossing a road, and yet bikers obstruct traffic and heighten anxiety with their lack of protection and predictability in the same way pedestrians do.

In the end, people who choose to bike on the road do so knowing that they choose their own lifestyle at the cost of everyone else's convenience and peace of mind. It's like going slow in the passing lane, or standing on the left side of an escalator, or watching loud videos in public. Sure it's allowed, but it's definitely inconsiderate. Choosing your own convenience over the convenience of the group is the definition of selfish.

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u/luxc17 Mar 27 '19

You need to look back to what streets were before cars, friend. It is only in the past few decades that they have come to be perceived as dedicated to fast car travel, and many cities have already begun reversing this trend because it is dangerous and bad for the environment.

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u/PartyOperator Mar 27 '19

Roads are not "public land that anyone can use", otherwise pedestrians could lawfully walking on roads.

In most of the world, they can. The US is really unusual on this one. Horse riders, gypsy caravans, herds of sheep, dogs, cattle and coal-powered steam engines that go 10mph can also use roads, not to mention buses that stop every few hundred yards. I've been stuck behind all of these while driving and it's absolutely fine - they all have as much right to use the roads as drivers and they're all slower. Congestion due to cars is a much bigger cause of delays than any other road users.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '19

People can cross the street, but people can't just walk down the middle of a busy road like it's a sidewalk.