Being told the roads are dangerous by the organisations which are there to promote cycling doesn't help matter. Yes there are some people who use it as yet another excuse but there are people who come to Cambridge & start cycling until they read spokes persons for organisations like the CCC saying that the roads are dangerous & so stop cycling.
Everything *isn't* great though - driving around me is mostly indifferent in quality (I get room if there is room, otherwise, the driver doesn't mind a skimming pass) with a leavening of actively good, and actively malicious (some of the latter from local bus drivers, genuinely terrifying on a couple of memorable occasions). A lot of drivers wilfully distract themselves from the task with phones &c. What should be reasonably pleasant residential roads are congested rat runs full of people desperate to shave a couple of minutes from their journey. Cycle facilities are disjointed and can make riding more dangerous (both by their crappy design, and by the conviction drivers have that you must use them) at best, they meander all over the bloody place, giving way to anything else wherever possible.
I'm not sure staying off A roads in cities is a particularly good bit of advice. In London, where there is a better than average bike use, many of the cyclepseudohighways mingle with A roads, and the presence of bus lanes make for relatively fast travelling during peak travelling times.
Post of the year so far for me.
I beg to differ.Even though I still cycle on pretty heavily trafficked roads, I do feel less safe now than before the accident. Possibly because just coming off the bike at an average speed caused me a really nasty injury. Statistically, cycling may be safe but accidents do occur every day ultimately with no one going out of their way to cause them. It's very hard to mitigate or legislate for that
Humans make mistakes in judgement, be it an experienced driver making a misjudgement of the road and other road users (as in my case), someone simply not looking properly at a junction, or a cyclist going up the inside of a truck (or finding themselves there)
More space for all road users is the aim. Unfortunately, I fear the UK and its infrastructure is simply too small to accommodate everyone to their absolute satisfaction and in harmony all of the time
Some, too many, drivers are going out of their way to drive badly ime
Some, too many, drivers don't actually register the fact that I'm there to go out of their way to drive badly around me. I actually find this more depressing than those drivers that do drive badly around me because they hate cyclists. I don't think it's because they are distracted per se, it's because they just have no sense of care outside of their box.
Now here's a thing, stuff cycle-lanes, (mostly they're crapp) and instead build more bus lanes at the expense of car space. Several birds killed with one stone.
