11 May 2009

As I’ve been riding my bike around town the last few days, I’ve noticed other bicyclists rolling right through red lights in the midst of traffic. It drives me nuts. The law is the law whether you’re on a bike or in a car. A person can make a fine argument about making ‘rolling stops’ in neighborhood intersections where stop signs are present and automobiles are not (and I’ll likely agree with it). But rolling through a red light when perpendicular traffic obviously has the right of way is a few things: ridiculous, stupid, dangerous, and careless, among other things. Rolling through a crosswalk does not make us pedestrians. We are still traffic, and we ought to behave as such. I’m also seeing bicyclers weaving back and forth amidst automobile traffic without any signaling, causing folks in cars to overreact and move into the lane of opposing traffic. This obviously creates a dangerous situation. These behaviors make bicyclers look really, really bad from the perspective of automobile drivers (and other cyclists behind them). If folks on bikes can’t obey traffic laws, then there is no sense in hoping for a city that continues to grow support for it.