Anyone who rides a bike long enough to start acting scary on it has lost skin before… they may still be in the process of figuring out how much they can get away with, but I’m pretty sure the vulnerability is pretty well apparent to almost every cyclist.
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They’re extremely rare around the University of Sydney, then. In the decade I spent there, I barely saw any.
Law-breaking bicyclists, sure; every day. But I never had a cyclist put me in danger, and the endangered cyclists themselves were pretty much all the consequence of incompetent or malicious car drivers.
As with motorcycles, a lot of bicycle behaviour that appears reckless is actually the cyclist acting to maximise their safety (maneuvering for visibility, positioning for escape routes, getting through intersections before the green light drag race, etc).
Sure, there are idiots using all sorts of vehicles. But the two-wheeled idiots are mostly a self-limiting problem, thanks to Darwin. Personally, if we have to have idiots on the road, I very much prefer that they do it on a vehicle that is highly unlikely to kill anyone except for the operator.
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The cagers in that video have some really odd ideas about what lanes are for. 
At about 4:15 he passes a biker who’s stopped in traffic and the tractor trailer he passes at around 5 minutes. Nail biting watch.
In some cases that just means a few spills when they were 10. When you see someone tacking back and forth across University Ave. in Berkeley at 10 on a Friday night wearing all black on a black bicycle with no lights, sorry, that’s not someone who understands their own vulnerability.
In the 80s I used to bicycle commute between Beverley and Hull in E. Yorks, and I wore a helmet. Other cyclists used to make fun of me for wearing a helmet. While helmets no longer seem to be objects of derision in the UK, those were all bicyclists who clearly had no sense of their own vulnerability.
But we’re talking about bicyclists who put themselves in danger, thereby freaking out the fraction of drivers who try to be responsibly cautious around them.
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Emphasis added
You seem jumpy and very concerned about hypothetical situations. Have you considered public transportation?
Also, the teleporter on my bike broke. I can no longer appear out of nowhere.
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Ah, that’s because the driver’s manual has the following printed on the first page, “Congratulations. You now own the road.”
(Okay, maybe it’s not there, but it sure seems like it here in California. 
)
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I think it is a universal problem.
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Seriously, you want to personalize this?
I’ve got a pretty good record over 45 years of driving, including both US and UK driving licenses. If you want to pretend that there is nothing that bikers and cyclists ever do that contributes to some driving behaviors, there’s not much I can do about that.
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Not really, it was a little tail twisting and I apologize, I see I did not do it well.
But while we’re at it, I never stated or pretended cyclist or bikers never did anything reckless.
I believe I have pretty consistently stuck to the issue of bikes setting up escape routes when stopping in traffic. I remain unconvinced you understand the behavior as described in the article and continue to create hypothetical situations to express your bias against fellow motorists who for some reason unnerve you.
I too have a pretty good driving record. Do my words count now?
You know what, Stuart, I like you.
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[quote=“critter, post:131, topic:82033”]
I remain unconvinced you understand the behavior as described in the article[/quote]
Pretty sure I do. I stop in traffic, a motorcycle traveling behind me pulls up and stops as well, but they stop near my (say) right corner rather than centrally behind me, for reasons as described in the article and some posts. I can’t see them because they’re in my blind spot and I’m driving a rental and the mirrors are imperfectly adjusted. We all start driving again, suddenly I see unexpected motion really close to my right side in my wing mirror.
This is not hypothetical, it happens pretty much every time I’m driving on on the 101 in the North Bay, which is quite a lot. Incidentally, I didn’t start this subthread, it was another poster with the same issue, so I’m hardly a freak here.
express your bias against fellow motorists
This isn’t bias, I have no problem with motorcycles, I just (mildly) don’t like this one behavior and would like those who opt to engage in it to consider including this problem in the list of advantages and disadvantages they are weighing where to stop. I admit to surprise that anyone who has ever driven a car is so insistent that this situation can’t possibly exist…
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