Two "favourite" comments:
An Angry Person said:
The green argument doesn't hold much water, either. So often, a motorist can be held up in a long queue of cars, all pumping out far more carbon monoxide than they need, with a lone cyclist with erratic steering, or worse a pair riding side by side oblivious of the traffic behind, leading the queue? The vehicles can't pass without endangering the cyclist, something they are reluctant to do, despite your rants.
Any carbon the cyclist might have saved by riding is more than outweighed by the excess resulting from the vehicles behind running in unnecessarily low gears.
.. and that's
logic, that is.
He's gotten his monoxide and dioxide muddled a bit, but let's ignore that and not even mention the likelihood that the cars probably won't be waiting all that long before they accelerate past (more carbon wasted, tut) to join the next queue 400 yards up the road. Or that maybe the person (it's unlikely to be people at rush hour after all) in the car would be better off on a bike.
An Even Angrier Person said:
What is needed is a little sympathy for the cyclist, he has been let down by the successive governments that have failed to spend his road tax on cycletracks.
His insurance company overcharges him for his third party insurance and the Swansea registation people make it difficult for him to get his byke through the MOT.
Sypathise folks these poor people have such a struggle to stay on the road.
It costs £0 for MOT. £0 for insurance and £0 for registration and all they want to do is clog up the road at slow speeds, jump lights and ride across pedestrian crossings.
I acctually had one ride into the back of my 4 x 4 when I was stationary.
He was carrying 2 buckets full of tools, one on each handle bar, so he couldn't reach the brakes.I was the stop option the other being the car going the othe way.Such wonderful carefull people.
.. you can almost taste the bitterness.
Actually, there's a surprising amount of balance in the comments on that article although there's the usual rabid ranting of course.
The second one above is kinda typical of a "type" of person you get on this kind of debate. There's a kind of jealousy involved, well not really jealousy; but they often compare themselves to others in a "it's not fair, they're not having to pay to do that but I have to pay to do this" way.
It's often said that the readership of certain newspapers are never happy unless they've got something to be cross about, but I wonder if the problem doesn't stem from the fact that they're always comparing themselves to others: "he's got that, she doesn't have to do that, they can get away with this". You'll never be happy starting from that mindset ..
