Who can forget the time a cyclist ran a red light and killed sixteen people?
The Telegraph and LBC are both right-wing propaganda mills.
Case in point:
In 2022, Hilda Griffiths, 81, died after Brian Fitzgerald, a Credit Suisse director and member of the Muswell Hill Peloton cycling club, collided with her while riding with other members at about 29mph in the 20mph zone.
Police could not prosecute Mr Fitzgerald because “there were no criminal Acts” which could be applied to cyclists who speed, the elderly lady’s inquest heard.
That’s pure horseshit.
That’s two; fourteen more to go!
ahhh going to the absurd. that’ll work. fuck. cars. fuck bikes who don’t follow the rules, too.
Fair but think about hitting and killing a cyclist who had run a stop sign or light. That doesn’t just go away. The person has to live with the trauma of killing another person potentially at no fault of their own.
I’m sure the parent whose kid or pet gets mowed down by a cyclist going full speed will appreciate that, hey at least it wasn’t more people who got hurt or killed!
Entitled assholes exist behind many modes of transportation. That cars can cause significantly more damage doesn’t make the others less dickish, like this guy:
(and yes, I drive AND cycle AND like to jog too, depending on what the task at- hand is).
That so many have come out screaming in the manner pretty much showcases the “rules for thee but not for me” attitude.
When did a car run a red light and kill sixteen people?
boomer ass take
That would be your mum’s standards.
Ah yes because every driver obeys every law all the time. It’s only the cyclists that break laws! No driver would ever consider speeding, rolling through a stop sign, or being aggressive!
Won’t someone think of the poor drivers!!
Your point is well taken, but whataboutism aside, EVERYONE should be obeying ALL the traffic laws. I cycle on public roads myself and I do see other cyclists not stopping at red lights. A bicycle IS a vehicle - it doesn’t come with pedestrian rights.
Or we can just keep escalating finger pointing and law-breaking until the traffic laws are meaningless everyone is dead.
I cycle thousands of miles each year, and I haven’t seen a cyclist run a red in years. Depends on where we’re riding, I guess.
So, why are you asking me to deescalate? Have you asked everyone else in this post and the author of the comic itself? Why pick me?
That’s fair… I didn’t mean to single you out. There were a LOT of posts, and I suppose the emphatic and sarcastic nature of yours drew my attention.
That said, I meant this as a general statement to all the commenters of this nature, and your comment is just where it happened to land. I don’t have any personal grudge.
Been in a college town recently? College kids are basically the cyclist in the comic.
They’re also the most dangerous drivers too…
Maybe we should just make everyone walk till the age of 25.
I haven’t noticed anything like that in college towns apart from late at night when it’s cold, there’s barely anyone around and the lights sometimes just don’t change for bicycles because they are too light. (The most common possibly illegal thing I’ve seen is bicycles overtaking cars stopped at lights to get to to the bike spots on a bicycle road where in some cases the cars aren’t even supposed to be.)
Meanwhile drivers almost all seem better but I am also aware that most
Laws are a social agreement, not divine. Breaking stupid laws is not bad, and does not imply that all laws should be broken.
Stupid laws like “stop at a red light even if you’re wearing lycra in public.”
I live somewhere where half the traffic lights don’t have buttons and don’t respond to cyclists. So when there are no cars to trigger the light I just check if it’s safe and go. Meanwhile I have been nearly overrun by cars speeding through red because it was orange 3 seconds ago and see a car going >50kph in my 30kph street almost daily. A bicycle is not a vehicle (at least in france in collisions we are classified as pedestrians). We are way more vulnerable and less harmful and the roads are often not made for us, so we have to adapt our riding to be most safe. Sometimes that means taking a pedestrian green instead of a car green light because it is safer too.
Whatabout, whatabout, whatabout.
The point is that while cyclists often get pissed off about the lack of safe driving by cars, there are many that similarly seem to ignore the rules of the road as applied to them. That may result in a collision with a vehicle whose driver is driving with proper care - with the cyclist tending to be on the losing end -but also other cyclists, pedestrians, etc.
Getting creamed by a cyclist (or scooter, or skateboarder) going at speed down the sidewalk - or one blowing through an intersection against the lights - is not going to be a minor injury, and I’ve narrowly avoided having myself, my kids, and once my dog get taken out in this manner.
Lately it’s been the battery-powered speakers scooters that are the worst culprits, but the cyclists who often bitch the most about cars are often the ones who seem to ride the least safely around here.
So yeah, not every driver obeys every lease every time, but similarly ignoring laws and being an assist is a good way to increase your own odds of having a bad encounter with one of those drivers, or one of the many others who share the streets and sidewalks.
Safe driving != law abiding. There’s overlap, but they are not the same thing.
A driver buzzed me and my dog a few days ago. In my own neighborhood, with snow and ice on the roads, and roads narrowed by snow on the sides (we don’t have sidewalks). Probably going 40 mph in a 25 zone. Less than three feet away from me. Idiocy.
Where are the comics about those drivers? Why are you so willing to accept drivers doing illegal things, while getting so bent out of shape about cyclists going illegal things?
Cars are way more dangerous than any cyclist will ever be. I know if I had to pick a vehicle to run into me, it’ll be the cyclist every time.
Anyone who runs a red light is a stupid cunt.
Anecdotally, in my lived experience, there are more stupid cunts on bicycles than in cars.
That is all.
LOL I see way more cars running red lights and stop signs that I ever see bicycles doing it. And cars do a fuckton more damage when they hit something.
When a cyclist runs over a driver I’ll give a shit about bicycles running stop signs.
I don’t understand. You’re saying bikes should be allowed to run the red lights because when cars inevitable t-bone them they’ll die?
That seems pretty sick.
Also ignoring that while the impact of a car versus cyclist or heavily in favor of the car, a cyclist can still cause major harm to another person, pet or even another cyclist
Per capita? Really? Where do you live?
Cars run red lights all the time. Also, ignoring train infra, traffic lights are car/motorized traffic infrastructure. I’m not abiding by rules that only needed to be made up to stop feeble car brains from killing each other.
Build bicycle infrastructure.
somebody recently posted a video on one of the fuckcars communities about how using boogle maps in Netherlands was impractical. In the same video they were explaining how they removed traffic lights from no car zones.
traffic lights are necessary because of motorized traffic. When you’re cycling you’re moving less than a hundred kg at about 15kmh, not +1000kg at 50kmh or more
NotJustBikes did a video on that. Really interesting
yes, that was the video i was mentioning, thanks for the name
notJustBikes video ☞ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csHdwHTteOw
This sort of attitude by cyclists is why we lack bike infrastructure in the US. Back in the 70s one weird asshole insisted that bikes be treated like cars and fought against it.
A brief explanation of just how bad that one guy was for the country.
A brief explanation…links to a 95 minute video. I’m still gonna watch it but later.
It’s not like the cars in my neighborhood are obeying traffic signals or roadway laws in general.
My biggest gripe with cyclists is that they act like a car when it’s convenient and a pedestrian when it’s convenient
Cars kill more cyclists than the other way around.
Hell, cars kills more cars than cyclists do.
Removed by mod
Literally my biggest pet peeve.
Without cars there would be no reason to have signal lights at intersections. Cars are clunky, slow to accelerate, sound dampening and huge, which is why they need all this wasteful infrastructure to make them feasible at all. People on bikes have much better vision and hearing so if you pay attention to the traffic situation, its not necessarily dangerous to run a red light.
That’s why I love my small electric car, all your complaints are invalid for it and I don’t have to freeze or get wet when I need to travel far up a giant hill.
Electric cars are heavier, noise dampened, and have the same blind spots, they do accelerate faster though depending on the situation that can just make an inattentive driver more dangerous.
Electric cars are better environmentally then gas cars but they certainly don’t absolve the need for traffic signals the way purely pedestrian and cycle traffic would
They are better, but only in a few ways. They are still very bad for causing sprawl, they shed microplastics etc.
I appreciate that his helmet strap isn’t locked. Accurate.
Personally I think it’s absolutely batshit insane that people ride their bicycles on the roads with cars, if I ride a bike I’m doing it on the fucking sidewalk.
