In response to a meme complaining about cyclists

[the_fantastic_ms_fox]

I'm not sure I agree with the subtext.

As someone who both drives as part of her job and bikes to work, I find that bicyclists are in a pinch due to lazy regulation. Legally bikes are vehicles in BC - because the province saw them as a luxury item when they wrote the law. Saying, "this is like a car" is the only way of articulating safety rules in conversation with motorists. Idaho, by contrast, actually took a look at how bikes work (they're small, manouverable, don't do that much damage when they hit a car, and are a pain in the ass to get going from a full stop) and revised their laws accordingly - red car lights are bike stop signs; stop signs are bike yields. And they've kept it on the books for decades. I'm not entirely sure what the multiple lane rule cited here refers to, but when I bike on a 3-lane road with 1 lane of parking, I have the choice of either getting tailgated and possibly killed or getting doored and probably hurt - I choose the latter until I run into a wide vehicle or one where someone might open their door, so there's a bit of back and forth between lanes. I signal as possible, but since people often pull into my lane without shouder checking, I sometimes have to change lanes fast and that requires two hands.

By contrast, when I'm in a van delivering film gear, I really don't give a damn if someone is bicycling on the road like a fool. As long as the only thing they're going to run into my 2-tonne steel box on wheels, it's their neck to risk. I don't have any major physical disabilities so If I don't like being a motorist sharing the roads with human power vehicles, I can suck it up and bike.

Unfortunately, because of a few yahoos, most motorists assume that all bikes are driven incorrectly. When biking, people will honk and gesticulate at me for, say, executing a left turn into the closest lane of traffic, as per the law on left turns, or kicking off of the sidewalk via a curb cut (am I supposed to *walk* my bike onto the road?). This extends to accidents - at work, a crewmember backed up into traffic, and a cyclist went through his window. The emerg responders blamed the cyclist for things like going top speed (30km/hr, down a hill, on a bike route), even though he had right of way. Had it been a car going at its legal limit of 50km/hr (about 2.7 times the kinetic energy per unit of mass and at least 10x the mass = 27 times the impact), both vehicles would have been fucked and someone could have been very badly hurt. So yes there are some yahoo jocks pedaling their bikes like complete tools, but at least they're being yahoos on bikes and as opposed to behaving like that behind the wheel of a car. But if we made some cycling rules that actually make sense, and did not treat bikes as cars (and then perhaps enforced them), they might start to obey them.