this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
701 points (94.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9807 readers
10 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Most assholes in cars can't be bothered to stop for twenty seconds -- like they're supposed to -- when there's an obstruction in their lane. They think there's some unwritten rule that they absolutely have to be moving no matter what's on the road in front of them.
The proper thing to do in these "squeezed by a bike" scenarios is to just let the fucking bike determine the pace for a little while, and then wait until the other lane is free and you can pass using it.
I've experienced that more times than I can count from cyclists on sidewalks that think that I should be expected to dodge out of their way just because they ring their little bell.
Maybe they just want to warn you so you don't startle when they pass.
Mixed use paths are not great for commuting.
Most sidewalks are not "mixed use".
At that point, I'd expect the cyclist to pull over and let traffic flow past.
The same way we expect slower traffic to keep right or use turnouts to let faster traffic pass them on mountain roads. Nothing wrong with being slower or less comfortable on the roads, but if you are causing traffic to back up, you can get out of the way.
The biker's loss is <1min as they use a turnout, shoulder or sidewalk, and the cars all get where they are going without needing to perform riskier passing maneuvers.
Doesn't generally apply if you have a single car but I've been in a situation behind a cyclist where I wasn't knowledgeable about the road ahead and was unable to find a place to safely pass for a while. I clearly was making the cyclist nervous, and I was nervous. A 10 second delay for the cyclist would have resolved the issue. Instead, I spent more like a minute waiting for a moment with enough visibility to let me safely pass.
Clearly you've never commuted by bike. You'd get nowhere if you'd have to let cars safely pass.
The problem is that this applies to assholes on bikes, too. This is not to defend asshole car drivers, but you cannot deny that quite a number of bicycle riders have a rather loose connection to the rules of the road.