Mr Farwell, by highlighting the scoffaws you make cycling more dangerous for law-abiding bike riders

Catherine Holloway
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I know I’m late to the party, but I’d like to make a counter-intuitive argument.

I commuted to work by bike for the 6 years I was in Kitchener between several different apartments and jobs. My commutes often took me on roads with no biking infrastructure. So I studied vehicular cycling and the collision stats and did everything in my power to reduce my risk of an accident, which in most cases means following the law.

However, every couple of months I would have an incident where I was endangered through no fault of my own. This would happen when a driver did not want to share the road with me, or was otherwise frustrated by a cyclist in their lane, and wanted to “teach me a lesson” with their car. This meant tailgating me, calling me the c-word or the b-word, passing halfway in my lane, or passing me lawfully and abruptly braking in front of me.

Though I can’t know for sure where they got this impression that they knew the rules of the road better than me, or that they were more deserving of the road than me, but I can’t help feel that the image of all cyclists being poor, drunkard, incapable human beings is helped every time they hear an opinion columnist talk about their negative encounters with cyclists.

Since leaving KW, I’ve also biked to work in Southern California (where the car is king) and Florida (home of the infamous petty-criminal Florida Man), and these places are much safer, despite having far worse cycling scoffaw behaviors. The difference is that the cyclists are usually committing these bad behaviors while wearing full lycra kit and riding a several-thousand dollar bike.

Funny how the same behavior is assumed to be competent based on the wealth of the rider…

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Catherine Holloway

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Software developer with a focus on hardware