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I'm a careful cyclists, purely out of self-preservation, and also because traffic in general is already stressful enough without me adding to it. Plus, I care about less cars in cities and not adding to the perception of "asshole cyclist" is helpinig, a teeny tiny bit. Still, you will get a lot of hate. Twice people have tried to run me off the cycle path followed by some unhinged diatribe about how the cycle path should not be there and that it's all a waste of taxpayer money and a bunch of nonsense. People are free to have that opinion, and I don't even especially mind of they go off on some rant about it, but they're not free to to consciously drive their fucking cars in my direction. Then, of course, there's all the places where there aren't cycle paths. I've lost count of the number of provocations. Minding your business, cycling how you should be, and someone overtakes you – no way they didn't know you were there – and just veers in to you because "toot toot I'm a car motherfucker imma driving here now". Then there's the pedestrians who will complain if you cycle on the cycle path because they don't realize it's a cycle path, or because they don't care. Or the cycle paths just ends with nowhere to go and you will get complaints if you go over the footpath because that's literally the only way to go other than the 80mph road (and not doing that). Basically, you will get hate no matter what you do. Plus everything tends to be extremely car-centric anyway, so if you're not careful it's not that hard to go to "I get abuse from entitled assholes no matter what I do so fuck you all then". No saying this as a justification, but there's some pretty bad feedback loops going on here. |