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My experience having to do daily deliveries in a small American town that had setup a bike trail that intersected with downtown roads is that cyclists are suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards and that most of them are far too stupid and/or arrogant to be allowed on the road. Ever.
I'm saw multiple instances where they'd blow through four-way stops, weave in and out of the road and sidewalk, and one marvelous instance where he blew threw a four-way stop by going on the pedestrian cross-walk only to immediately weave back into traffic. Occasions where if I - in control of a rather large transportation van - had not been driving extremely defensively, people would be dead.
The only time - the only time - I ever saw one of them obey the laws as required was when I dealt with a cyclist actually signaling she was going to turn. I signaled as well to allow her to pull in first, and I went behind her gently to park. She actually came up afterwards to thank me for that, which I thought weird, given that she was the one actually doing her due dillagance and doing what needed to be done.
I don't have much sympathy for cyclists.
do you think it would be better for them to use cars?
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This is overly antagonistic. Don't do this.
How is it antagonistic to describe the activity I've seen with my own two eyes?
If you have better terms to describe it, I'm all ears.
"I believe you are stupid" has never been an ok thing to say on this forum. Even if it is entirely true and you definitely believe it. The first bullet point on the rules sidebar is "Courtesy" that ordering is intentional.
If you are asking how to be discourteous to people you don't like and follow the rules around here it is quite simple:
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In small town America, 100% of adult cyclists have car licenses. What you're observing is that most people are 'suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards'.
Only in the case of cyclists, they can't use this 'stupidity' to kill a dozen people with simple twist of their arms.
Weird that many of these people's neighbors can successfully own a cache of firearms for their entire adult life without brandishing it against themselves or another innocent human. Only target dummies, deer, and turkey need be afraid of these allegedly "suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards."
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I don’t think this is true, and let me give an analogy. I have been several times to a sportsmen’s show in a small city, with classes, vendors hawking their wares, guides pitching services, that kind of thing. The level of firearm proficiency among attendees is pretty high, and the level of firearms safety is very high. At an event like this, you could pull random people out of the crowd on a busy show floor and hand them loaded rifles without causing me any concern at all. Obviously there was no reason to do this and no one did it, but the odds of an incident would be low.
One year there was a booth selling stun guns, and people did some pretty irresponsible things with them – things they would never have done with firearms. The people were the same, but their behavior was very different. To everyone there guns were serious and required respect, but to many stun guns were toys, and they treated them like toys.
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The US has a high rate of vehicular deaths but it isn’t that high. I wonder how motorcyclists and cyclists stack up in deaths per road mile traveled? Assuming similar behavior you’d think motorcyclists die at a higher rate because of higher speed.
Motorcycle deaths per 100 million VMT is far higher than cars -- about 26.2, compared to 1.20 for passenger cars. This is probably largely because a motorcycle provides almost no protection to the occupant in a crash (though behavior probably also plays a role). Cyclist fatalities per mile aren't really known because miles traveled isn't really known.
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This, unfortunately, matches my experience in semi-rural, suburban, and light urban in a moderately-sized American city and surrounds. Nearly to a person, cyclists that I encounter on non-neighborhood roads want all the benefits of being considered a "real vehicle" when it suits them, and also all the benefits of being a "fragile human being" when it suits them. Even to the point of having no sense of self-preservation or common sense - for example, there is a twisty back road near my house which is posted at 45mph, has approximately 3" of shoulder (and a drop-off into the ditch), and many twisty bends such that a bicyclist riding not on the shoulder will not be visible to a car until VERY late in the game, and a driver not being very defensive and careful would have a hard time avoiding them...
And yet, constantly, I see bicyclists do this, including getting upset when I refuse to go around them when I can't see far enough beyond where they are to know that moving out into the actual other lane of traffic (which their road position will make me do) would be actually safe.
The reason for bicycling on non-neighborhood roads is they are the ones which go places. Same reasons the drivers use them. I'm not sure what else you'd expect.
The comment was more directed at why pick a road which has (1) a speed limit which even doped-up Lance Armstrong could not approach or sustain, (2) that has no escape routes either for the bike or for a car which encounters a bike, and (3) highly restricted sightlines that make bikes much more of a rolling roadblock than under other circumstances. The area is not lacking in bike trails, and based on the attire selected, approximately 0 of the bikes I see doing this are doing it just to get from point A to point B.
(1) A speed limit is not a minimum. (2) You are supposed to be able to stop even for stopped traffic, not depend on magic escape routes to get you out of trouble. (3) You are supposed to drive in a way that is suitable for the circumstances.
And bike trails can be quite short, unsuitable for a racing bike, not linked to other nice roads that one might use, etc.
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