Posted by Bicycles and cyclists. Love or hate?
Well, if some of my friends are to be believed, everyone hates cyclists. But of course, that’s not entirely true, is it? I for one am both a motorist and cyclist, as are several of my friends. Some are motorcyclists too, or horse riders, or just plain old pedestrians.
I had an interesting conversation, albeit a social media “chat” after one friend posted a picture of two cyclists riding side by side on an apparently fairly quiet city street. He wasn’t at all happy that he’d been held up for what he said was 10 minutes. I suspect that it was probably considerably less than that, but we’ll assume he was correct. There were various positions taken, but the thing was, they were all, without exception, on either end of the scale. Either people thought that the cyclists were ignorant idiots, or that the driver was.
As the discussion continued, the two sides started to make concessions to each other. “Oh, well maybe, in this case, they, the cyclists, were being ignorant”, or “Actually, yes, maybe the driver could have been a bit less upset by the incident”.
The thing that struck me, in particular, was this. Most cyclists are also motorists of one sort or another. However, most motorists are not cyclists at all, ever. So there is a vast imbalance in levels of understanding and tolerance. I don’t dispute that some drivers who have never cycled do in fact understand what cyclists are up against, but most have no idea.
I’m going to take the risk of listing some of the difficulties cyclists face here, in the hope that those angry drivers among us take a few minutes to understand why sometimes, cyclists do those really irritating things.
- Cyclists often can’t hear you approaching and therefore don’t always prepare themselves to be overtaken. I’m lucky enough to have enough money to afford a Bike Radar, that warns me of approaching traffic behind me, and lets me know how fast it’s approaching. You can buy one here.
- The surface of any road is unpredictable, there can be patches of grit, badly made repairs, drain covers, sticks, and leaves, things that a motorist wouldn’t even notice. (On a side note, did you know that The plural of “leaf” is “leaves”, but the plural of “Leaf” is “Leafs”. … If a plant sprouts a leaf, and then another, it has two leaves. But when the Canadian emblem, the Maple Leaf is used to represent a sports team, they are the Maple Leafs, not the Maple Leaves). So cyclists often weave around these, often unseen by the motorist, hazards.
- Cyclists wobble! We see it but understanding why doesn’t concern most of us. Bicycles are primarily held upright by the ability of the rider to balance the bike, not because of the supposed gyroscopic effect of the wheels. However, the more slowly the bike is going, the more difficult it is to balance. On hills where the bike is being ridden more slowly, and often the areas where motorists get most frustrated, the rider is also more likely to wobble. This often causes drivers to think that cyclists are being deliberately awkward.
- Bicycles are human powered mostly, although there are some great electrically assisted ones around too. To get any speed up, the rider not only has to move the weight of the bike but also his or her own weight. This means that they accelerate slowly because even a fit cyclist generates something less than a third of one horsepower. Compare that to a small car at about 75 horsepower. The car would need to weigh about 3 tonnes to get similarly rubbish acceleration.
- Cyclists riding side by side can indeed be irritating for motorists. The reasons for doing so are generally not to upset drivers. It’s done because it’s more sociable and ironically safer. Drivers have to slow down as they need to pass something of a similar width to a small car, as opposed to being tempted to squeeze past between the oncoming traffic and cyclists in single file.
I don’t for one minute think that I’m likely to change anyone’s opinion of cyclists, but I do hope that if you’re a motorist but not a cyclist, you have just a little more understanding and tolerance when confronted by bicycles. They are in fact keeping another car off the road, and that just might mean that you’re not stuck in a traffic jam for those ten minutes, instead of behind a cyclist for two minutes.