On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Bob W <[email protected]> wrote:
> Er, London is a city too. Do you really believe that because some cyclists > break the law all cyclists should be forced into unsafe behaviour? How about > if all motorists were forced into unsafe behaviour because some of them break > the law? Bingo! It's really easy to pick on cyclists - we're slower moving (compared to cars), we aren't enclosed in a steel and glass cage - we're easy targets. But I've seen cars going the wrong way down one-way streets (on purpose, because they were only going one or two driveways down!). As for stop signs, sit at one and count the number of cars that don't stop. I've done that several times. Not counting if a car has to stop to let a pedestrian or another car go first, if there are no other vehicles or pedestrians at an intersection, it's about a 90% no-stop rate, everything from a rolling stop to barely slowing down. Ever sit at an intersection with traffic lights? Virtually every change to a red light sees several cars "sneak" through well after the light has turned red. I admit that bikes can seem a nuisance when we break traffic laws, but keep in mind that when we do so we tend to do much less damage than cars often do - usually the person injured is the cyclist alone. It's been about 5 years since a pedestrian was killed by a bike here in Toronto. In the meanwhile, some fifty or sixty pedestrians a year are killed by automobiles. If we're going to "crack down" on bad road manners, who should we go after, cars or bikes? Yes, I know, the answer is "both", but please, don't target us before cars. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
