Nothing can go wrong here, everyone will happily wave to you as well! The one finger thing is just a weird custom, don’t worry about it!
Actually a normal pro-tip.
Center of the lane is the safest place to be, as it allows you to change lanes, and prevent dumb “squeeze-by” overtakes. Other traffic “enjoyers” can see your signaling better.
Also, there’s fewer glass-bottle shards, debris, and gutter covers in the middle of the road.
If there’s no dedicated bike lane it means we get to share the road… right?
Yeah…the negligence I see is noise canceling headphones and that’s about it. Cyclists should be aware of their surroundings and sometimes that includes being aware there is a vehicle behind you that is bottlenecked in traffic.
But cyclists aren’t beholden to car speeds and sometimes riding in the middle of the lane is a matter of safety.
It can be dangerous to skirt the outer lane because it’s often outside of clear view of the drivers who are behind 2 ton vehicles moving at ~double the rate of speed.
Same story over and over again.
The vulnerable traffic members must be acutely aware of their surroundings all the time, and so they have to „enjoy“ the sound of 2-ton metal cages zooming past them with > 50 km/h.
Meanwhile, nobody thinks it’s problematic that said metal cages are better soundproofed than the average US home, and are allowed to enjoy Wagner‘s Walkürenritt at 90 dB on their 1456.32 hi-fi surround system while running over some bike. How dare you inconvenience my right to feel completely alone in the middle of millions of people.
If you want to make a bike more secure, add a mirror. That gives you way more awareness of your surroundings.
My tinnitus forces me to bike with noise canceling headphones. I mean sure, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. But listening to sounds provides a false sense of security. I’m extremely aware of my surroundings since I started using my AirPods. Never do I stop looking around me. This has without a doubt made me a much safer person in traffic.
So even that might not be all to dumb. Though if one is to use headphones, it’s no casual stroll, it’s a constant game of looking out.
Keep in mind a lot of noise cancelling headphones have a passthrough mode as well. If there’s no bike lane provided, they can probably hear just find and were ignoring the asshole driver who thinks “bigger faster vehicle = owner of the road.”
Ah, yeah, that’s true. I mainly wrote this with the least charitable view of drivers in mind, as you describe at the end, which is why I considered what I wrote to be a SLPT. If you have a better driving culture that’s mindful of bikers/cyclists, this may not be as much of a SLPT as I initially thought. 😅
Maybe you should focus your energy on those drivers instead of writing sarcastic comments about some biker who mildly inconvenienced you by taking the space they are allowed to, and who have to listen to the noise your and all the other cars make (which you don’t realise, because you are sitting inside the comfortably soundproofed metal box).
Err, I think you’ve misunderstood where I was coming from in writing this. There was no biker that annoyed me & inspired this. Instead it was another post to a biking community here asking for advice on riding in cities, & I knew this wouldn’t be right for that thread. This was meant more as snark towards obnoxious drivers & encouraging bikers to be mildly annoying to them.
The SLPT is because this puts the biker at risk due to shitty/obnoxious drivers by being less situationally aware and inciting their road rage at the mildest inconvenience.
