perceived safety in numbers, etc

One too many in's in that first post

What might shock you is that the most bikes per capita is actually Minneapolis.

Oh NM, I looked it up and it looks like Portland's #1 again, but that's fairly recent, however they do these studies in the first place. But LA? Last time I was down there I literally saw only one bike, and it was being stolen off the subway by a dude who looked like Easy-E. The bigger shock was that none of the people I was staying with knew that LA had a subway, but nobody bikes in that town it seems.

This has been my experience with nearly every biker in Philly: zero regard for pedestrians. They wanted to be treated like cars but don't act like they're in one.

I love the "I should be treated with the same respect as a car!" followed by the half-commute at full speed on the sidewalk move.

I think bicycles should obey all traffic laws except they should treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs.

Even worse than Critical Mass are the street closures they have for this thing called "Sunday Parkways" (or maybe it's Saturday) where they block off major pedestrian streets so families can parade themselves around on their bikes, running into brunch eating hipsters waiting in line for their stupid brunch, and making my bike commute to work, because it's something that I go to, take a good 10 minutes longer. At least CM are good at riding their fucking bikes.

They always speed off, or try to.

Someone I know, his girlfriend was slammed into by one of these sort of cyclists, a total hit-and-run. Knocked her unconscious and she had to get reconstructive facial surgery because when she hit the sidewalk her nose was completely smashed.

I know another woman who was hit and injured by one of these idiot cyclists on his fixie bike, her husband was able to grab the guy before he got away and held him for the police until they showed up. The cyclist, described to me as some scruffy-looking guy with a stupid-looking styled beard, turned out to have no job, no money and no insurance.

This got me thinking of a well-known and respected doctor who was getting ridden on by a bunch of bicyclists at one of these things, mostly because he was in a Jaguar or something. Anyway fed up he just slammed on the brakes and the bike and cyclist went right over the top. The bikers were doing a shitty thing but there's no reason to rage out on that level, and he was brought to justice.

What I see here is that same aggressive bike behavior, but from the front, and the guy creeped up on him, or as the culprit says "pushed," the same way as you probably would react if it was another car going the wrong direction, after honking, yelling etc. did no good. I'm not defending either party, but all of these bicyclists were behaving in an illegal fashion with or without the U-Lock smash. In summary, if this was another car, or motorcycle doing the same thing, you'd be like "what the fuck were they thinking doing that in the first place?" and that would be that.

I don't know what the laws are in San Francisco, but in Portland bikes are treated like vehicles, which they fucking are. And as such, bicyclists get pissed off when they're ticketed for riding on the sidewalk, which they do, often putting pedestrian lives in danger. If I was walking down the street and a bicyclist cut me off or tagged me I'd be pissed. I don't think I'd get aggro and kick his or her wheels or push them off, but if I saw it happening I'd say that was justifiable reaction, because I see it nearly every day. Plus dude's driving a zipcar, which in the long run is a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation, given that most of these folks (I'm willing to bet) still have a car that they use for road trips to Burning Man and such, which is probably of the O-Zone destroying variety.

I'm a bicyclist and commute by bike, don't own my own car, but I have to drive a car at work, so I'm Switzerland on this one. I get shit from bicylists from time to time when they see me driving and don't really have the time to shout out "hey I'm one of you guys this is just for work" or whatever..

Incidentally, Portland not only has the most bikes per capita, but also the highest suicide rate in the USA. Dun dun dun!

This is actually not too out there for Critical Mass type cycle activists. Critical Mass jerks love surrounding cars and shouting at people inside them, or throwing bottles and trash at cars.

Critical Mass-holes pull stunts like taking over intersections and preventing cars on cross streets from moving into them, so the CM riders don't have to obey any traffic signals. As an added bonus, the blockaders and their friends, some of who are often riding around drinking heavily and totally illegally on their bikes, passing bottles back and forth, etc. - will surround blocked cars and pound on them and so on, especially cars with drivers who get justifiably irritated or enraged by their antics.

Critical Mass blockades and mass rides are always held on busy streets at peak times, with stunts like groups of them going down the wrong lanes, etc. just to screw with everybody and everything...for Justice, of course.

If the ride's big enough and the bicycle anarchists and people who show up wearing stupid costumes and such feel like putting on idiotic street theater posing as a protest or doing bike tricks at every intersection a person can easily get stuck for forty-five minutes or an hour or more, so people are rushing from work to pick up their kids after practice or trying to finish up their last delivery of the day, so they can go to their second or third job or trying to get to three blocks away, because somebody had a heart attack and they're driving the ambulance and these shits are holding traffic up with their stupidity.

What surprising is this jagoff with the dumb mustache is getting prosecuted, in certain West Coast cities where this nonsense goes on, it's amazing how much shit the bike activists get away with, besides the dozens of traffic laws they often violate each week.

I say this as someone who bikes and thinks car-dependency has had negative consequences on urban centers, it's not bicycles I have an issue with, it's these inane, entitled subcultures which include the like of Critical Mass, the sort of people who whine that BIKES SHOULD HAVE THE SAME RIGHTS AS OTHER VEHCILES :jumps on sidewalk and zips down it at 30mph narrowly missing pedestrians: and like the worst car drivers act like it's just them on the road.