Just spent two weeks cycling in the US and found the car traffic very scary

That’s awful.

Interesting experience on today’s ride.

Noting first that I passed or was passed by roughly 40 cars during my hour ride (rural area), 39 passes occurred without incident.

The other interaction was noteworthy.

I had ridden down a remote paved road that changed to gravel, and simply turned around. Maybe a mile after the turnaround, a diesel 4X4 truck (with a lift kit and Trump stickers) comes up behind me, pulls to the other lane, and shouts out his window:

Driver: “Are you going to ride down this road again?”
Me: “Not today, but I live nearby and ride through here sometimes”
D: “Just wanted to let you know my dog is out. He’s friendly, but he might chase you. His name’s Hershey.”
We talked for another minute or two, figured out that he’d gone to school with my son, and he gave me his business card (he does HVAC repair)

If I hadn’t talked to him, it would have been easy to draw all sorts of conclusions, but as it turned out, he went out of his way to make my ride safer. As another poster said, there is lots of bias confirmation out there, but if we extend the benefit of the doubt, we often find friends and allies on the road.

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No amount of precautionary steps will protect us from drunk and stupid. < sigh >
2 killed, 3 hospitalized after car crash during Make A Wish bike tour (wxyz.com)

Unfortunately, these things happen everywhere. This just two weeks ago close to my home in Southern Germany. The driver was not even intoxicated. Overtook a car and did not see the two cyclists. He claims because of low sun. He was driving in NE direction in the evening! More likely that he saw them and thought he would still get past the other car. Stupid cyclists anyway. I experience this all the time on the road. And this time it ended in disaster.

However, what makes me really angry are those commentators below the article.

Exactly. As the world gets faster, things more complicated, people RAGE at anything that slows them down. That means cyclists.

People will stare at their phones for 5 seconds after the light turns green, causing others to miss the light, but they’ll rage at a cyclist for delaying them the slightest bit.

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And this is in the UK. Wow. And I thought riding around here was bad, but bikers have had trash thrown at them. Bottles, cans, etc. But this article is so depressing/horrifying.

Note the ‘rightwing press’ comment. I’m so sick of the BS those poisonous companies spray out. So wonderful they are. If only hate wasn’t so profitable. I thought their hate was jealousy, but it’s much worse than that. People who can’t think, but feel the seething resentment they are being fed. (sigh)

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And too many people rage at what they are told to rage at, without questioning or thinking about it. Yikes…

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What you describe is the source of another bias, of the sampling kind. The number of observations in Boulder County after 30yrs of driving approximates the real distribution and you are bound to “see everything”. Whereas touring with your Dad in the south is a much smaller sample prone to be biased.

I just spent a weekend at a multiday club gravel riding event in Trinidad, Colorado. I’ve never meet such courteous drivers, and this is oil/gas country. Every vehicle on the road was a big ole truck, but every driver slowed down for us, waved, and many even stopped to chat with our group. Go to Trinidad for the best maintained gravel roads and long views of the Colorado prairies. They are really trying to draw in that tourist base and have made a lot of headway accommodating big groups and gravel races.

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so true.

And it’s happened to my family too, and way too many others. Sad.

Why can’t they all just ride a bike and be happy?

You have got to be kidding me……I’ll just suggest you re-read what I posted in this whole thread. The whole point of my posts was to provide examples of systemic inequalities which lead to the higher death rate for cycling and walking among Blacks.

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I reacted badly to your, and others posts taken out of context. I apologize to the list, and you.

Car/bike, and car/runner accidents are sometimes deliberate acts, and that is likely part of what helped fuel my response. Every time I pass a ghost bike I have an incredible wave of sadness. (Do runners have a similar marker when a runner is run down?) It’s horrifying that some law enforcement and judicial actors whitewash it, dismiss it, refuse to prosecute it, plea bargain it to meaninglessness. Who knows if race plays a part in it.

I only hope the next one isn’t me.

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We’re all good…thanks. :facepunch:t2:

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I like this cartoon, which highlights the warped thinking perfectly

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It is horrifying. Unfortunately things are not much better in the UK. An already banned driver who killed a cyclist while driving 80 mph in a 30 mph zone has just been sentenced to 4 yrs and 8 months in prison, and banned from driving for 5 yrs and 3 months. I don’t know if the license ban starts at the same time as the prison sentence but it’s astonishing that he’s getting his license back at all. Oh and he drove off and torched his car to get rid of any evidence… Banned driver who killed cyclist in 80mph crash in Normanton jailed | ITV News Calendar

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The ban effectively starts at the end of the prison time (although it’s slightly more complicated than that because of the weird way that there’s a starting assumption that people will only actually serve half the time they’re sentenced to).

Well it’s still horribly lenient

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But happens in America all the time. The courts are overloaded with petty cases and hogtied with needless regulations. To better deal with ‘drink drivers’, and especially those that kill others while drunk driving, it would seem that the courts should develop an accelerated processing lane for them that if you are caught drunk driving, you instantly lose your license for 10 years, and if you kill or have an accident that results in death, you instantly go to prison for 25 years, no chance of parole. If the courts (politicians) made drunk driving really bite people hard, I’d think/hope it would become very much less frequent. Reading about people that have been caught driving drunk 5, 6, 10 times, is outrageous! By that logic, people up on murder charges should be released too. Bank robbers, rapists, CSA perpetrators, etc…

And my brother was caught DUI. ‘But they were stalking the bar. That’s unfair!’. NO, IT’S NOT! You were DRUNK, and DRIVING. And if he killed someone?

But America seems to have a possessive/abusive relationship to their cars and driving. People have also been able to sue and get their licenses back after being caught DUI. It’s too sad…

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And there was that accident in LA where a woman that had been arrested for DUI several times and was at one point under psychiatric care drove her expensive car into a crowded intersection killing a few people, and survived the crash due to her really expensive car.

And all I could think was ‘suicide by car’? Alcohol was involved I heard. So who should have stepped in at an earlier time and taken her off the road, and auctioned off her car to pay for ‘drunk driving court’. As I remember she had been charged several times with DUI. Each time, no doubt, escaping a well earned jail term by slick expensive lawyers and a bedraggled court system.