While language is powerful I am not sure it will help, as in Australia calling it a registration fee, leads to "but you don't pay rego" arguments. It's particul

While language is powerful I am not sure it will help, as in Australia calling it a registration fee, leads to "but you don't pay rego" arguments. It's particularly silly in Australia as a huge number cyclists are car owners anyway. For my part when I moved to a dense European city with clockwork public transport I gave up cycling and am much more stress free because of it. I think I'd only return to cycling in areas with proper lanes or separate paths or a prominent cycling culture (e.g. Denmark or the Netherlands). There is just too much stress involved with sharing the road with aggressive cars when there are no separate lanes, particularly when being forced very close to parked cars where people fling open their doors. The other poster in this thread saying he's only been "hit only lightly a couple of times" says it all, even if the stats for serious injury aren't that high it's just in your mind all the time. All that's to say nothing of people deliberately coming close and beeping just to bully, or people double parked sleeping in bike lanes. The one that takes the cake is probably the person who ran a red in their car, I was waiting for it and yelled at them, and then deliberately crossed into a cycle lane I was in and braked heavily to deliberately have me smack into the back of them sending me over the handlebars and ruining a wheel. Police not taking things seriously was the main a problem there. If someone had some other huge piece of machinery that wasn't surrounded with the cultural aspects of a car and deliberately smacked it into someone they'd be in a court in short order. While I find Top Gear amusing and will always support sports driving in designated areas I think self-driving cars can't come soon enough. The process will accelerate pretty heavily in the countries with poor public transport infrastructure facing the retirement of the post war boomers as well.