I get why getting behind any vehicle moving at 30% of the expected rate of speed is an annoyance, and that annoyance is doubly so when it’s a person just doing recreation.
But what I come back to is that cycling isn’t just recreation. It’s also a legitimate form of transportation for some people who cannot drive (for various reasons) or for those who cannot afford it. It’s also one of the last remaining forms that isn’t privacy-invasive (either by the state or corporations).
People on two wheels should be conscious of holding up traffic, but those on four don’t own the roads. We’re all in this together.
I wonder how many people I get stuck behind on the road that are just driving to the gym, when they could run out their front door instead of on a treadmill
One thing people don’t get is that car people think that the cyclist took his car to ride his bike as a fun activity. Nobody could be doing anything “legitimate” like going to work on a bicycle.
That’s also part of the Vehicular Cycling/Forester problem. Forester, distilled and paraphrased, was a proponent of “serious” cyclists, which included the MAML (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) on racing bikes and excluded the person picking up groceries on a bike with baskets. Which summs up to “cycling is for recreation”. And visibly, the aggressive cyclists tend towards that MAML image, rather than dad picking up groceries or mom cycling to work.
I get why getting behind any vehicle moving at 30% of the expected rate of speed is an annoyance, and that annoyance is doubly so when it’s a person just doing recreation.
But what I come back to is that cycling isn’t just recreation. It’s also a legitimate form of transportation for some people who cannot drive (for various reasons) or for those who cannot afford it. It’s also one of the last remaining forms that isn’t privacy-invasive (either by the state or corporations).
People on two wheels should be conscious of holding up traffic, but those on four don’t own the roads. We’re all in this together.
I wonder how many people I get stuck behind on the road that are just driving to the gym, when they could run out their front door instead of on a treadmill
One thing people don’t get is that car people think that the cyclist took his car to ride his bike as a fun activity. Nobody could be doing anything “legitimate” like going to work on a bicycle.
That’s also part of the Vehicular Cycling/Forester problem. Forester, distilled and paraphrased, was a proponent of “serious” cyclists, which included the MAML (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) on racing bikes and excluded the person picking up groceries on a bike with baskets. Which summs up to “cycling is for recreation”. And visibly, the aggressive cyclists tend towards that MAML image, rather than dad picking up groceries or mom cycling to work.