That's my impression to. Bikers apparently think that those funny white stripes on the roads and bike roads are some kind of decoration, not passage for pedestrian. Many bikers think that they have priority there...
IME every mode of transport has people who consider themselves to be more important than any rules that govern them. Pedestrians walking on cycleways and getting angry at getting belled at. Cyclists ignoring red lights or cycling on sidewalks. Motorists driving/parking on sidewalks and cycleways or not yielding to pedestrians when exiting a roundabout. Basically anything that inconveniences certain people seems to be grounds to inconvenience others or at least not care about them. This doesn't seem to be restricted to certain modes of transport, although the faster the mode can be, the more dangerous the clashes become. I guess it's then more about the mindset of people than their way of getting around.
That being said, when I was in driving school way later than most people who got their driver's license, I suddenly noticed a few things as a cyclist: People in cars don't see anything from inside in comparison. So some things cyclists do end up endangering them needlessly because they may lack awareness about the problems drivers may have reacting to that behavior. This probably cuts both ways and we'd all be safer if there are more cyclists on the streets so drivers get accustomed to looking out for them and there are perhaps fewer instances where anyone, cyclist or driver, would be compelled to resort to something dangerous just out of inconvenience. But at least for me I basically changed my cycling behavior to act like a car. And when in a car I at least know how cyclists feel in certain situations and can avoid them. Leaving space, not overtaking where you can't, anticipating somewhat erratic behavior (cyclists can't always give hand signals when turning, for example). And honestly, it's not a big deal or an inconvenience. But then again, it's also how to behave on the road in general according to the laws (first paragraph of the German highway code is literally to exhibit caution looking out for each other, and that goes for everyone in theory).
Well... I'm both a pedestrian and biker (and I generally use a car when outside my city) and honestly, I find it normal for pedestrians to give priority to bikes.
It's just a lot more energy expensive to stop and start again for a bike, while it is essentially free for a pedestrian.
As a pedestrian I always try to avoid making bikes stop unnecessarily, and most people seem to do the same here, even if pedestrians technically have priority. Most people here are also bikers at times, so I suppose they understand this better than pedestrians in places where bikes are seen as something special/annoying/for other people.
Well if energy output is your reasoning: then it's orders of magnitude more energy for a car to come to a full stop and re-accelerate than it is for a pedestrian to let it pass.
Should cars then have priority over people in a crosswalk?
I hesitated talking about this in my post, but I should have.
There are two different reasons to consider for pedestrians having priority over cars, unlike over bikes.
First, as the sibling comment says, there is no energy personally spent by the driver to stop and start their car. It's effortless, while in the case of a bike, the energy is the biker's own.
The other reason is that it is generally more difficult to cross a stream of cars that don't stop compared to crossing a stream of bikes that don't stop. Cars drive faster and cannot really deviate from their path (more than a few tens of centimeters) while bikes drive slower and can more easily move while staying in their lane to make way for a pedestrian without stopping.
Of course, reading comments here (and generally, comments on American websites) you would think that bikers in general are found in the form of a swarm of dangerous, malevolent savages that are totally unpredictable at best. Maybe that's the case in the US (that was definitely not the case in Québec when I was living there but that's my only point of reference in North America) but it was not the case in any of the cities of Europe and Asia where I've lived.
Bikers are just more averse to stopping because they are more physically affected by it than users of other forms of transportation, and not because they are a despicable subspecies of humans with a particular propensity towards bothering others.
> there is no energy personally spent by the driver to stop and start their car
Funny, in a way. An old ... acquaintance used a corollary of this back in the 90's. Because he drove a truck, stopping it and then getting it moving again took considerable amount of energy. Much more than what a pedestrian would require.
As such, he considered himself having the drive of way over pedestrians and the heavier the vehicle he was driving, the better the reason he had to run the lights. And if necessary, over pedestrians.
Why is energy expenditure the metric we're using to judge who should stop? In my opinion the metric should be this: whoever has the highest capability to cause injury to another person should be the one who has to be more careful and considerate. Injury is more consequential and potentially life-altering than energy expenditure. From this perspective, motor vehicles should give way to bikes, bikes to pedestrians.
Not for the driver. This isn't an environmental argument. This is an argument that a pedestrian just has to stand for a moment, a driver just has to slightly move their feet, and a bicyclist has to do a bunch of physically strenuous shit to stop.
Here is the issue. As you can see from my previous comment I agree with you, that cyclists are a danger from a pedestrians perspective.
The problem from a cyclist's point of view is that having to stop every block to let pedestrians cross, would really really really suck on a bicycle; just losing all momentum and having to start from a stop. It would also probably be bad for the knees after a while.
It also really sucks to have to constantly stop in a car for all of those annoying traffic lights, stop signs, and of course crosswalks. It would be much much much easier and faster to just continue driving without stopping to my destination. It would also probably be bad for the environment with all of that extra idle time waiting and acceleration.
The argument sounds ridiculous when framed from a drivers point of view. And it's the same from the cyclists. Either you want traffic laws to be obeyed or you don't. Offering up that "really sucks" isn't a valid reason to ignore the laws.
> Either you want traffic laws to be obeyed or you don't.
In fact, no, it isn't binary. Driving laws are written in blood. When a driver speeds or runs a red light they massively increase the chance of severe injury, death, or catastrophic property damage, for both themselves and everybody around them.
This is just simply not the case for all other modes of travel. So, no, I don't want the laws to be either "enforced or not." I care way more about enforcing laws on the drivers of multi-ton machines traveling at high rates of speed than I do the guy on a bicycle or the pedestrian.
This frustrates drivers, who demand that everybody be treated the same. But it's absurd to treat all modes of travel the same, which is why a ground crew isn't required for you to back out of your driveway, even though it is for commercial jets.
When driving, cyclists are dangerous for themselves and for others.
When walking, cyclists have absolutely no regard for my physical safety. When I lived in a city with a lot of cyclists I ended up developing some kind of fear that made me look around all the time because of how many cyclists had almost killed me when I was peacefully walking along the pavement.
In Germany I see this as basically an infrastructure problem. Most of the bike lanes are just a painted red strip on the sidewalk. This is dangerous because it puts cyclists so close to pedestrians--who often move unpredictably into the bike lane--and it's easy as a pedestrian to accidentally wander into the bike lane. Especially at night when the red is hard to see (they should have chosen a brighter color like neon green) or near bus stops when pedestrians getting off the bus are almost forced to immediately cross the bike lane.
This is not to mention on some streets the bike lane just randomly ends and you find yourself on a sidewalk with no separate lane and you have to choose whether to stay on the sidewalk and risk hitting a pedestrian, or dangerously swerve into the street and risk getting hit by a car.
If they just built proper separated bike lanes protected from car traffic, and clearly separated from pedestrians this simply wouldn't be an issue at all. Copenhagen has it right where the bike lanes are painted bright blue and are on a physically raised level from both the street and sidewalk, in addition to prioritizing bikes and pedestrians at many intersections without stoplights. It's a joy to cycle around Copenhagen because of this.
Absolutely, bike lanes in Germany are an afterthought _at best_. I see bike lanes here springing into existence randomly with no way to get on (you're on the street with the cars, and suddenly you see a bike lane on the other side) and, similarly, ending with no reasonable way to continue (just hop off the sidewalk here please!). In my neigborhood, "red" means bike lane 50% of the time and sidewalk the other 50%. There is literally a sidewalk close by where the lane colors switch half way through. They're also often poorly paved with big bumps to get on and off at intersections.
Being born and raised in the Netherlands, this was a bit of a nasty surprise when I moved here. I really think you can cut down car use significantly by improving the infrastructure. The distances and landscape lend themselves well to biking, but the roads do not.
I've always found it ironic that there's a certain breed of cyclist who regards car drivers the way pedestrians regard cyclists, while regarding pedestrians the way car drivers regard cyclists, and while simultaneously perpetrating every insult that any of the above imposes on any other.
(Obviously there are many courteous cyclists too, just as there are many courteous drivers and pedestrians, I'm just talking about this particular group.)
Rather than trying to divide people into categories based on how they happen to be travelling (many cyclists are also drivers and pedestrians at times), I find it better to appreciate that a percentage of the population act like assholes (5%?). The thing is that assholes in motor vehicles are likely to injure/kill someone, whereas assholes on bikes are as likely to injure themselves as others and assholes on foot are very unlikely to injure others (excepting the ones that step out into a road/cycle path without looking). So, what we need to do is attempt to get as many assholes out of their cars and onto bikes (or foot) for as many journeys as possible. I welcome seeing an asshole on a bike as it means they're not currently an asshole in 2 tonnes of speeding death machine.
… unless you’re longboarding around 20 mph and just about to go through a green light when a dozen bikes come flying through at 20-25 mph 5 seconds after their light turned red.
That’s what happened to me. Only reason I didn’t get trampled was because I had a funny feeling and decided to slow down as I approached the intersection (buildings obscured my view of possible traffic).
They had zero sense of self preservation, let alone any regard for anyone else.
I believe that longboarding on a public road at 20mph would be illegal where I live. It certainly sounds pretty dangerous. What's the stopping distance at that speed on a longboard?
Yeah, I never try to time lights like that anymore, I’ve seen so many cars blow red lights. I always proceed slowly and look both ways for one coming at a fresh green, whether on bike or in car.
I’ve had a similar experience walking, I was in the middle of a crosswalk on a four lane road by the time a dozen teenagers blew through their red light, popping wheelies on gold plated BMXs, cars screeching in the middle of the intersection to avoid hitting them. I almost yelled at the first one that went by me thinking they were the only one, but was very glad I didn’t when all the others passed around me. One of the wildest things I’ve seen in a city.
Not OP, but this your "reality" is wrong. For example, three days ago in Warsaw, a cyclist ran over a child (ER took the child to hospital) on a busy promenade on the bank of the river. The cycleway is temporarily moved there because of the roadwork and the space is designated as shared between cycle and foot traffic.
For several days pedestarians complained that cyclists drive like crazy and it's "when" not "if" some cyclist will hit someone. That unfortunately proved to be accurate.
Meanwhile there's over 2000 deadly car accidents a year in Poland, 20% of which are pedestrians[1], meaning there's more than one pedestrian killed by a car every day.
Yes, collisions between vehicles and pedestrians happen where the two interact, and the places where they do can be different for different classes of vehicles. What's your point?
> a cyclist ran over a child (ER took the child to hospital) on a busy promenade on the bank of the river.
Promenades happen to be dedicated to pedestrians. So pedestrian was hit in a place, where he was supposed to be safe.
And then...
> Meanwhile there's over 2000 deadly car accidents a year in Poland, 20% of which are pedestrians[1], meaning there's more than one pedestrian killed by a car every day.
These accidents probably didn't happen on promenades, pavements, sidewalks, footpaths or other places dedicated to pedestrians.
So back to my point: comparing apples with apples. This comparison wasn't it.
There's a rule that says that if you have (and have a right to at all) ride or drive anything on wheels in an area designated primarily for pedestrian use, you have to move at pedestrian speed. It doesn't matter if you are on a bicycle or an electric scooter, or on a garbage truck, 5 km/h it is.
And yet people seem to promptly forget about it as soon as they get onto their killing machines. Must be something in the wheels or saddles causing them a selective amnesia.
Electric scooters on crosswalks are surely a plague. Teens on them tend to ride out of the bushes at their maximum speed and cross roads without ever slowing down, making it quite hard for drivers to anticipate. Yes, you have right of way, dolt, but so has a car that just turned right, after making sure it's clear to go. There is no way to tell that a crazy kid is going to jump out in the next 300ms.
Imagine if during road work they created a "temporarily shared space" between car and foot traffic.
This is still a systemic issue due to poor urban design/planning. The kid was injured because the city didn't properly separate two different modes of transit. Even if it was "temporary"
We could live in a world where treat bike lanes with the respect we treat car lanes and give them proper detours and this wouldn't be an issue.
I love cycling and bicycles, but I have to say you have a point in your second statement. Back in the days when I used to live in Helsinki, streets became much more dangerous after cycling became popular and city built dedicated cycling lanes. Suddenly all the hipsters with their 5000 USD handmake Swiss custom bikes are out there to kill the pedestrians.
Outside of some developing countries I've never felt threatened by cars, but I've been just less than a second away from death or permanent disability because of bicycles in Helsinki, Berlin, Tel Aviv etc.
It sounds so hard to believe that streets became “much more dangerous” with “cyclists out there to kill pedestrians” that I looked for sources on the matter.
First result [0] says there were zero pedestrian or cyclist fatalities in 2019, with ping-term trend being increasing safety.
Another result [1] on how it was achieved: “cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars and generally made life harder for motorists”.
> Outside of some developing countries I've never felt threatened by cars, but I've been just less than a second away from death or permanent disability because of bicycles in Helsinki, Berlin, Tel Aviv etc.
What less than a second away means to you?
I think there is a bias based on perception. When people see a cyclists going in their direction they assume said cyclist will ran into them on purpose while a bicycle comes into a complete stop in just a handful of meters and can avoid objects easily. I am not condoning riding fast and recklessly in path shared to pedestrian and cyclists and I tend to lower my speed at barely more than running pace but a lot of that comes from perception.
One other example, I have been riding MTB for years in swiss Alps, in trails shared by hikers and mountain bike. If I am in a descent I tend to go quite fast when visibility is good and I can see what is at the exit of a corner. When there is no visibility I will reduce my speed dramatically to be able to stop for any hiker, cattle or whatever that could be in the way. The thing is braking hard on a mountain bike with aggressive tires on dirt/rocks is quite a noisy affair and involve a bit of sliding, which is fair and nice. Hikers on the other side of the corner would often end up being afraid by the sound and shouting insults at me like I was a criminal while I had preventively braked to a safe speed in order for anyone to be safe. Perception bias. In later years I started braking much earlier and in a longer distance has to do less noise, removing fun just so that people are less afraid. It didn't change a thing regarding their safety. Sad.
> Outside of some developing countries I've never felt threatened by cars, but I've been just less than a second away from death or permanent disability because of bicycles in Helsinki, Berlin, Tel Aviv etc.
One seriously distinct American thing is to claim deadly dangers in extraordinary safe situations and places.
Being hit by a cyclist is no laughing matter, especially if you are a child or elderly. That said, cyclist/pedestrian accidents account for relatively few deaths and injuries compared to other forms of transport.
> That said, cyclist/pedestrian accidents account for relatively few deaths and injuries compared to other forms of transport.
Yes. They are both less frequent and the consequences are less grave. Even among people who survive them, the injuries are less serious then injuries of car accidents.
Also, more specifically, Berlin and Helsinki are not unsafe with their use of bicycles. There is no army of permanently disabled people due to use of either in those cities. Whatever is the root of hate toward cyclists, the actual safety is not it. For that matter, people who use bikes for transport rarely use super expensive bikes. That part of the comment does not work either.
