Dave Brown

It occurs to me that whilst such signals are not practical for mounting on a bicycle (it’s too narrow, and in the dark, the other road users would be hard-pushed to work out which direction is being signalled), it would be practical to stick them on armbands. With modern technology, you could also get them to automatically come on when the arm is stretched out sideways at a certain angle, giving a totally unambiguous signal.

Also, whilst I am generally pro-cycling (I do it myself if Edinburgh were even slightly flat), the idiots annoy me. It therefore pleased me to see a police van do the flashing blue lights traffic stop on a cyclist who was riding along North Bridge with no lights. They gave him a good telling off and made him push the bike. He probably jumped on it again once the police were out of sight, but hopefully such a public dressing down was embarrassing.

I’ve actually thought of a lighting arrangement that could hang under a bicycle’s saddle that would work okay. The secret would be in the rear light being on all the time. A red light, with an orange light blinking on the left or right hand side would be sufficient signal that an average cager would be able to figure it out as a cyclist turning left or right.

I can’t figure out why this kind of lighting rig isn’t widely available though.

Adequately bright lighting with a reasonable run-time still doesn’t exist for bicycles. Auto headlights draw current measured in dozens of amps; taillights and blinkers five amps and up. Even with a high powered LED system, a bicycle can’t compete with a car’s lighting system as the autos’ lights’ surface area is vast, and there is a large, unlit, silhouetting object behind the lamps to differentiate and isolate them from the (in cities) very distracting background.

No, the answer isn’t “make bicycles look and act like cars” the answer is either “95% fewer cars” or “separate laneways for bikes.”

Yeah, I was clipped again a couple weeks ago. Basically, I was crossing University at a non-light intersection and having gotten to the other side of the traffic lanes, I took a good look down the nice wide on-coming bike lane and the nearby sidewalk… which was clear, so I turned to the left to make sure I wasn’t going to hit a pedestrian from that side as I stepped onto the sidewalk and got clipped by a bike going road speed on the sidewalk from the right (which, being a bike, made no footfalls and was very stealthy). All I could think was that he was lucky I wasn’t a car, because he was going full out with no signs of slowing down before crossing the street to my left… and a car turning there might only have been looking a few yards back onto the sidewalk, not the relatively huge distance he’d be covering. There’s a reason why it’s the law in Ontario for bikes to be walked across streets when using pedestrian crosswalks… even if they do check further back, they could still miss a bike because its cruising smoothly with the rider off the ground and not making the same motions or profile of the things you expect on the sidewalk.

The lesson is pretty much the same… if you want to bike on the sidewalk, you need to blend in and behave more like pedestrians by riding slowly, taking extra care at crosswalks (if you aren’t going to get off and walk across), and not doing things like using the sidewalk as the “fast track” to go road speed when the traffic on the road is congested. If bike riders want to know why they get a lot of flack, it’s because of those bad apples that think that the rules of the road for bikes are the best of the benefits of cars + the best of the benefits of pedestrians – any responsibility (when being fast, stealthy, vulnerable, and top heavy should imply being extremely responsible and careful to work with the rules properly)… everyone else out there has to assume that you’re one of those idiots because we’ve all seen a few of them, and there’s typically not enough opportunity to verify that you’re not in the group.

They’re not that much narrower than motorcycles. The big problem is being bright enough to be useful, whilst not carrying kilograms of battery.

In the Australian states I’m familiar with, one is only legally obliged to indicate right when on a bicycle (left being only a matter of convenience for traffic wanting to pull out of an intersection, and safety trumping convenience). Incidentally, I very rarely indicate right as well. Particurlarly in melbourne, where the right hand is responsible for the primary brake, and one wanting to keep full control of both handlebars in order not to suffer an under-the-tram incident on the tram tracks. I use my road positioning to make things damn obvious instead, and just be damn careful.

There are different populations of cyclists, you know. Just like there are squids and responsible bikers.

There are dickheads that ride the wrong way around a roundabout without looking coming from down a hill at speed at night without lights (and only get spotted because my own 15W halogen had a wide enough spread), and then there are those that also get hit just because they ride often, even though they are doing the full Vehicular Cycling thing.

I never rode on the wrong side; I had the aforementioned 15W halogen and a 90000mcd rear flashy LED (sure, it may blind people, but at least they can’t say they didn’t know I was somewhere there), I rode sufficiently far from the gutter that I only got sideswiped once when I didn’t take enough of the lane, and I never blew a red light. But I was doing about 7000km a year in melbourne traffic, so yes, I got hit a few times.

Respect is a funny thing. The guy who got “stuck” behind me abusing me for not …. doing something, was most amusing. The 4 lane road was completely empty other than the 2 of us. For some reason, he was probably wondering why I didn’t respect his big dick.

(PS., you probably don’t notice the sensible riders because they don’t stand out. Although, a friend of mine got abused by a driver that pulled up alongside him at a red light, presumably because my friend belonged to the same class of thugs that the rider just in front of them that did blow the lights, belonged to. Fuggen cyclist fags)

In Berkeley, and all over the San Francisco bay area in different municipalities, we have separate lanes for bikes. It doesn’t stop most of the cyclists you see from constantly changing their mind about where they want to fit in—as a cyclist on the road, as a pedestrian on the crosswalks (illegal here), or as a block to traffic at a red light, doing donuts in the intersection until the light turns green, in front of cars that are ready to run them over because the cyclist is making them late for yoga, all because they don’t want to unclip their foot and stand at a stop.

The separate lane idea only works if cyclists respect it. In my experience, that is rare.

I hate cyclists who run red lights and ride the wrong way down the street. Drives me crazy. But I do all the responsible things — stopping at lights, riding the right way, having lights — and it doesn’t stop motorists from acting as though I’m not there. The street I do most of my riding on has a bike lane, which I use, but no one pays attention to whether anyone is in the bike lane before, e.g., turning right in front of me into a driveway.

Road positioning generally works quite well, bicycles being the narrow things they are. If a bicycle is way over on the right, odds are he wants to go right.

One situation where you’ll never find me not signaling when I’m on my bicycle is when I want to turn right and there are cars behind me in front of whom I want to cross the lane. Then it’s definitely arm out, make sure the car sees, then move over.

When I was a child you could get a rig like this for bicycles, it was meant to make kids take cycling more seriously because it would make them feel like they were driving cars.