CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Today I nearly got into a fight, and then an argument with a mediating third party, over me taking primary position to prevent an overtake at a traffic island.
Any mention of phrases like "primary" and "secondary" position, correct space to overtake, the Highway Code etc were instantly shut down because the guy mediating wasn't a cyclist either.
Quite frankly the whole thing was rubbish and I'll go back to illegally cycling on the pavement in future.
Sorry to hear that dougal. Sometimes it feels the whole world is against us even when we are doing 'the right thing'. Don't let a pair of morons spoil your day.
A guy shouted at me from his car the other night as I took primary around the corner from canon gate left down St Mary's St. You have to take primary to make sure you do not hit the tourist pedestrians prone at any time to leap from the kerb. Felt peeved but knew I would top trump him at the Cowgate junction as I would dismount and push across the pedestrian crossing. When I did this he was shouting again which was needling me a little but it turned out he was shouting at a pal maybe. Prior to getting on my bike I had been dealing with a man who was quite shouty on the phone from Belgian German border. But we managed to come up with a plan despite the shouting. Chap on the phone was just frustrated. Chap in the car was jut one of those big shouty guys that shout at everyone. Never meant much harm I reckon.
An actual mediator listens to one side whilst asking the other side to be quiet then he listens to that person when the first person should be quiet.
Tonight in the Colgate a removal lorry reversed into A taxi. Taxi pulls up onto pavement, driver out with his pen. Removal guy abandons van blocking both roads whilst they argue. Massive tailback both ways but hey, not for bikes.
Trying to argue with someone who thinks you're inventing rules from Bikeability or Highway Code is beyond frustration. Of course they refused to come and see a copy of the relevant regulations.
I was told that I they only needed to leave me { this much room } as per the adverts. Those adverts do more harm than good.
It's rarely worth trying to educate drivers in those situations. They are simply venting their frustrations (likely with life, but crystallised by being in a car but unable to do exactly what they want due to all sorts of constraining factors).
A big thumbs up and wave is my preferred response.
Getting into an argument on the road with anybody is like playing Pigeon Chess:
"...it's rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory."
The problem with primary position is that it goes against what's been drummed into everyone's head: that cyclists must be in the gutter unless about to immediately turn right.
Remember that ASA ruling last year (?) where the ASA disapproved a cycling awareness ad party because the cyclist shown wasn't cycling in the gutter?
I find it helps to avoid roads which are busy with traffic, i.e. most of them. I stick to known wide quiet roads and to offroad paths (which aren't busy with pedestrians).
It's limiting, but means that I still get out on the bike most days and rarely come into conflict with anyone, so for me it's best in the long run.
Yes, but some of us want to use our bikes to get from A to B as quickly and conveniently as possible. I'm not going to go the long way round just because some person thinks I'm holding them up: and they can go away.
(This post has been edited to comply with forum rules.)
"This post has been edited to comply with forum rules"
Well done.
Anger is an energy (as someone once said)
I have to agree with PS and earthowned here - you're never going to get anywhere trying to rationalise a situation with a frustrated car driver who feels some sense of entitlement. It doesn't matter that you cite for several sources and they only cite from their distorted view, they won't listen to you.
If you get an opportunity to discuss such things away from the road environment, then that can potentially be productive but I have (almost) given up on trying to have reasoned conversations on the road - particularly around the time of an incident of some sort.
I would continue to ride the way you know is correct, and do as edd1e_h says and try not to let the eejits get you down.
Of course hugging the gutter isn't that simple!
Random pictures from yesterday.
All (presumably) experienced and probably commuters (and coincidentally - but not entirely unrepresentatively - male).
I don't think that 'here' we think 'that's the way things are (traffic), learn to deal with it', but things change slowly in 'the wider world'.
Thinking about it a bit more, I guess the "the impatient <person> can <go away>" attitude is a consequence of the way the roads are. If I could cycle from A to B without conflict with either drivers or pedestrians, of course I would. But I can't. In Holland I could (mostly) - I'd only come into "conflict" with other cyclists (they have bicycle jams there...). So I have the choice of obstreperousness or getting in a car...
chdot - crazy perspective in those photos. If it wasn't for the Royal Mail van I probably wouldn't have recognised where it was.
"crazy perspective in those photos"
Just a bit of zoom...
Yep, the daily Mail van is just one of the hazards there!
@fimm - exactly. The conflict between road users is caused by the design of the road. It's inherent. To get rid of the conflict, we need the roads to be redesigned to comfortably accommodate us - so we can cycle without ever getting in the way of faster/heavier/more powerful vehicles.
Everyone should of course feel free to use whatever legal route they want to, and more power to their elbow - err, thighs. Me, I can't be doing with all that anger and conflict. I'm for a quiet life (which is why I like cycling).
"The conflict between road users is caused by the design of the road. It's inherent."
I have to disagree. The conflict between road users is caused by certain road users feeling they have more rights to the road than others. I don't believe that is caused solely, or even significantly, by road design.
you're never going to get anywhere trying to rationalise a situation with a frustrated car driver who feels some sense of entitlement
Truer than a true thing from truesville
On Tuesday evening I hit a car - bumped into a car.
I was just entering the ASL box on Princes Street, the light to Charlotte Street was red. just as I was positioning myself to the left, a car moved from being just inside the box, to wanting to move all the way to the ASL.
Slow speed emergency stop. wee wobble. Wee fall into nearside wing.
Immediately, the driver rolled down her nearside window and yelled "you hit me"
She completely and utterly failed to grasp that I only hit her because she pulled in front of me into a space she wasn't entitled to occupy!
I've lost some of the nice green paint off my metal bar end plugs. I think she lost a fair bit of blue paint from the wing of her previously shiny car.
Strange that although she verbally blamed me for the collision, she made no attempt to get out and inspect the damage to her car. The noise would have told her there was damage!
@rust when the road layout naturally guides cyclists and motor vehicles into separate areas of the road, or onto separate roads, there's no conflict between cyclists and drivists* simply because they're in different places. As it is, in this country we're usually expected to share (and thus compete for) the same bit of road space.
When you have some spare time I recommend a read of aviewfromthecyclepath.com. It's full of illustrated explanations of exactly how changing the road layout can alter behaviour dramatically.
* (C) Kaputnik
It's a combination of the two though really isn't it?
If road design separates traffic forms there's no trouble;
If everyone using the roads (cyclists, drivers, etc.) acts with common sense and respectfully in shared space there's no problem.
If the road puts the forms together AND people act disrespectfully to each other there's a problem.
All that said, I'd say designing roads to separate users is probably easier than changing years of ingrained belief; though at the same time you simply cannot, practically, have a segregated cycle lane by every single road in the country, so people have to share the roads at some point, and that being the case you ALSO need to work on that mutual respect.
Go to Copenhagen, they've designed out the conflict AND the drivers are more respectful (as cycle lanes naturally have to cross junctions, and drivers, generally, wait for you to pass etc.).
Ain't as black and white as 'cycle lanes solve everything'... (after all, we got a lovely segregated lane in the very centre of Edinburgh and it got constantly driven on...)
Anger is an energy (as someone once said)
You're not going to get high marks in a science test.
I was in Edinburgh on Saturday. Boys enjoyed getting there by train as their mum had taken the working car to Ireland. They weren't entirely convinced that the Mound was man made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mound
I wouldn't have been easy to spot, Ray Bans and a Kangol Trilby but no Brompton.
Whilst I accept that engineering out conflict can help, my experience of cycling abroad is that it doesn't matter how badly designed the roads are, the drivers are, on the whole, far more polite and tolerant of cyclists. It's an attitude, not the result of an engineering solution. The idea that a cyclist at a pinch point is, 'holding up' a car and has no right to be there, does not seem to exist. Drivers share the road, but apparently do not want to compete with cyclists.
Drivers in continental Europe are more tolerant because they are more likely to be cyclists themselves.
Why are they more likely to be cyclists? Because they built the protected infrastructure to encourage them to be cyclists in the first place.
A virtuous cycle. (no pun intended)
Certainly true, to an extent, in Copenhagen, which was car-centric before they sarted turning it around in the late 70s - though not 'just' infrastructure per se, also things like the green wave, and street layout that wasn't intended to separate cyclists or make it safer, but rather make the car more inconvenient, which then got people onto bikes etc etc.
Not so much in the Netherlands where the infrastructure just followed the fact that so many Dutch already cycled. They maintained that culture right the way through in spite of a lack of segregated lanes and so on - so the tolerance was already there then they thought, why not make it even easier since so many already cycle. And again a lot of the encouragement to cycle isn't necessarily in safety infrastructure, but in the likes of the massive conveniently placed bike parks that sit closer to the railway stations (for example) than car parking.
So many shades of grey as to why there are so many cyclists, can't be put down to one cause, and the primary causes will be different in different locations.
What IS clear is that in the UK both the safety infrastructure, the 'other' infrastructure (I mean, bike parking on George Street is abysmal), and driver culture, ALL has to change. Some will feed the others, but there's an interplay to it all, which is generally why trying only one and expecting it to be the magic bullet never works.
I'm with @rust on this. It's like having kids. You can child-proof your house, but you've still got to teach them not to stick their fingers in the sockets for when you visit your childless friends house. Same goes for drivers :)
As @Wilmington's Cow said, a multi-layered approach is needed.
"Not so much in the Netherlands where the infrastructure just followed the fact that so many Dutch already cycled. They maintained that culture right the way through..."
That's not my understanding of the history - I understood that cycling was declining and road conditions were getting worse (i.e. more car dominated) but campaigns in the 1970s managed to get the start of the construction of the cycle paths and the more they built the 3-space system the more it became apparent that that was a good thing to do so they built more of it.
Fair point, I was going off what someone from Amsterdam told me of his time growing up there in the 70s, but Google says different.
I still maintain there's not a 'single approach solves everything' solution.
Good grief, he (and therefore I) couldn't have been more wrong. Hmmm. I suspect he started out cycling in the 'dam after the initial change had been made. Looks like it mirrors what happened in Denmark - they went about it a bit differently (and I prefer the Danish model, didn't find Amsterdam cycling relaxing at all!).
Interesting that there's the idea that "people are nicer over there".
I can't say we noticed it in Denmark - on a twisting, country A road without parallel cycle infrastructure, we endured close passes, hooting, shouting out of windows and gesticulation.
Fortunately we're used to that as a family...
I think people are people all over, and thus we need to engineer out the risks of stupidity, carelessness, distraction and aggression.
Norway (although possibly not a cycling country) has the same issues as us:
Robert
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts