Nuxx:98532f19-d77b-4e60-88fc-f69c5d3e426c@t12g2000prg.googlegroups.com

Path: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!t12g2000prg.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Message-ID: <98532f19-d77b-4e60-88fc-f69c5d3e426c@t12g2000prg.googlegroups.com> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: Motorist letter in local rag Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:21:35 -0700 (PDT) References:  Lines: 22 Organization: http://groups.google.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 88.105.204.241 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1207916496 26047 127.0.0.1 (11 Apr 2008 12:21:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:21:36 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: t12g2000prg.googlegroups.com; posting-host=88.105.204.241; posting-account=7_6kYAkAAABD6HrjM0VxehwvZOKMxm4g User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Bytes: 2429 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:646742

On Apr 11, 12:32 pm, Mark  wrote: > After I got home yesterday after two motorists overtook me only > giving about 2 inches of room I read the local rag where some ****hole > had written a letter saying that cyclists should be fined for cycling > on the road if there is a cycle route.

I don't agree that that should ever happen, and far too many cycle lanes are unusable for one reason or another. But just out of interest, if there's a cycle route which is easily accessible, on the right side, safe, of a good standard and just as flat and direct as the road (if not more so), why would a cyclist elect not to use it unless he was trying to make some point like "I'm proper traffic and I'm not going to get out of the way of motorists even if it would make it easier for me as well"?

No-one's saying cyclists are "second class road users", but if a good quality, useful, fully usable cycle lane has been built at the taxpayer's expense, then surely only a cyclist with a chip on their shoulder would still bring themselves into conflict with other traffic by using the road. As with red light jumpers and idiotic motorist- hating nutters, it's cyclists like that which give other cyclists a bad press.