5 ms·

Human driven cars have a bicycle problem as well. Humans aren't very good at predicting or seeing them either in dense urban areas. Grade separation is the way

• bamboozled 10y ago
  Did you just make that up ?
  • CydeWeys 10y ago
    Make what up? Ask any cyclist, and they'll be able to recite to you a long litany of horror stories involving human-driven vehicles. I routinely deal with multiple cars driving in the (non-grade-separated) bike lane on my commute every single day.
    • wtvanhest 10y ago
      Yeah, I started commuting via bike recently. 5sh miles, all on busy city streets. Up valencia, then market, then about a mile along embarcadero. We really need to do something about people parking in bike lanes and in my opinion should completely close market to cars. Allow chariots, public buses etc. Anything with 5+ passangers, but close it to everyone else. There is just too much going on to have that mix. We also desperately need more grade-seperated bike lanes and bicycle only traffic signals that are aggressively policed.
    • bamboozled 10y ago
      Sorry if I offended you or anyone else. I too commute a lot via bicyle and also drive, which is why I disputed your comment. I find motorists often see me fine...when they're paying attention and I'm using common sense, ie lights when riding at dawn, not running reds etc. We're talking about vision / detection here, not people being unattentive, aggressive or inconsiderate, which seems to be the actual problem with motorists and cyclists. If a self-driving car is 100% dedicated to driving and still has problems detecting bikes 75% (at best) in optimum conditions, that's a different and important issue that I don't believe exists in human drivers today. I actually hope for both our sakes that if self-driving cars do take over, it's for our benefit as cyclists.
      • CydeWeys 10y ago
        No offense taken, I just couldn't make heads nor tails of your comment. I too am quite optimistic that self-driving cars will be vastly better to deal with than human-driven ones. The constant 360 vision and 100% adherence to turn signaling will be vast improvements. Every day I deal with drivers making unexpected turns, and not checking for the presence of bikers before turning across a path that bikers might be traveling in. Self-driving cars won't have these problems.
        • m0nty 10y ago
          > Self-driving cars won't have these problems. My concern is that they will, but policymakers decide a few dead cyclists is a price worth paying. In the UK, we're already ignoring an air pollution crisis (mostly from car fumes) which is killing c. 40k people each year. On top of the KSIs from actual road accidents. Uber have shown all too clearly that some companies will hide or ignore safety issues in this area.
      • _greim_ 10y ago
        Pro-cyclist advocacy seems to have reached a point of equilibrium against apathy and anti-cyclist sentiment, thus bicycling amongst human-driven cars is as safe as it's ever going to be. With robot-driven cars, the bicycle problem is an area that engineers can focus on and iteratively improve—essentially forever—even if cycling amongst robot-driven cars right now is as dangerous as cycling amongst human-driven ones.
• Stratoscope 10y ago
  Human drivers don't even follow the most basic bicycle safety rules, such as merging into the bike lane before making a right turn to prevent "right hook" collisions. From my observations, probably no more than one out of ten drivers does this. I guess they think it's illegal to drive in the bike lane at all, even though the opposite is true: at least in California you're legally required to merge into the bike lane in the last 200 feet before the intersection when making a right turn. http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/ http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/
  • koenigdavidmj 10y ago
    Oregon law actually requires the unsafe behavior, though I expect that has very little to do with how drivers behave.
  • phil21 10y ago
    If you travel (and drive) regularly between 2 or 3 states, it will be almost impossible to "intuitively" remember all these rules. What you describe is outright illegal in my home state, but required in a large city I also split my time in. Road rules for bikes and bike lanes are wildly different depending on state, and heck - even city. There are states where you have one set of rules within city limits, and entirely different throughout the rest of the state. It's a huge mess, and doing things like putting unprotected bike lanes to the right of traffic lanes is almost criminally stupid and dangerous. You cannot undo decades of muscle memory ("things don't pass me in the right lane especially on dense city streets") and then point to "there is a rule that says you have to!" when the expected tragedies start occurring. I used to think drivers and bikers were just "assholes" to each other in the US - then I spent time in the Netherlands and Belgium and realized these two modes of transportation are purposefully being put at odds against each other in the US for political reasons. It's quite possible to combine these modes of transportation into a network that works for both types of users.
    • cardiffspaceman 10y ago
      By physically separating bicycles and automobiles? A perspective from a writer who favors separating bikes and cars: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secret-sect.html http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secr...
• tetetttte 10y ago
  much as I wish humans could share the road, separation is the way to go. People are too territorial on the road, and drivers and riders alike have too little attention available to reliably avoid each other. The road makes people stressed and leads to mistakes
• flukus 10y ago
  I don't know if it's a recognition problem, IME it's a not knowing how wide their vehicle is problem.