I actually posted this to my Facebook a while ago. I hyped it up a little for humour purposes so people would read it so try not to take too much offence. I've lived in canberra where cycling is pretty easy. But also newcastle, very few cycle paths here and I'm doin okay. If you love in a metropolitan City area as big as sydney I understand if you needed to use roads more often. Because Newcastle and canberras City areas are quite tame.
I ride my pushbike to work every day, and have been doing it for years and have never had issues with cars nearly hitting me, ever. My logic for bike riding is that if you can walk somewhere in the city, you could ride your bike the exact same way and never have any issues, it wouldn't take longer and it would be much safer. Other cyclists piss me off so much and now I am annoyed because NSW is upping all the fines to a ridiculous amount because of stupid cyclists and everybody hates them.
This might be a bit long, but as a fellow cyclist, I am going to point out why you are all doing it wrong and why you are always on the news and making everybody look bad.
First off, your stupid f*ing outfits, you're not f*in Lance Armstrong, I am sure you'll do fine in a pair of shorts, you might lose 5 seconds of performance over 20 kilometres, but the pros of not having to spend big money and look like a f*wit are worth it, not to mention you'll be cooler, and you will probably save 20 minutes a day because you do not have to struggle in and out of that shit before work, when you get to work, when you leave work, and when you get home. "They promote blood flow blah blah" Yeah so does pedalling your legs and getting your heart rate up. You are not racing for seconds, you are riding to work.
Why do you have to cycle main roads? I do not understand this at all, it makes no sense, you have a bike, that's literally the best thing, you can take any street without losing speed or time you can take different routes and see different things instead of having to drive the same way to work every day it makes it more fun, on a bike you usually don't need to slow down for corners because you're not going that quick and your bike weighs under 7 kilos, unlike a car which weighs 2 tonnes, you can shortcut through alleyways and side streets, don't have to worry about traffic lights and stopping all the time, you can just roll through giveway signs, and you know the other bonus that on a quiet street you're less likely to die because odds are you're not going to have 40 cars having to get past because you're doing 40 in an 80 zone with some idiot texting while driving, and another guy leaping out of his car like a runaway convict. Instead you're doing 40 in a 50 zone, there's no doors, very little traffic, and no dudes busting onto the street like gangbusters about to raid a crackhouse.
My next question is why you always have to cycle on the road, from time to time you will have to, that's fine, and you can't always take backstreets, but there's another option:
You are legally allowed to use the footpath, it's unlikely you have to pass pedestrians, and if you do, there's a nice big strip of grass right next to most footpaths, or you could slow down and pass them (Oh the horror of having to pedal harder for 5 seconds to get back to speed you fukn cry babies) I ride on footpaths and backstreets all day, I don't have to worry about car doors being opened into me, or being run over, occasionally I might have to slow down to see over a hedge if there's a car backing out if I am on the footpath, or if the footpath is close to driveways, I just go back onto my nice quiet street down a smooth little ramp, when a car comes I either ride the other side of the street, or ramp back up onto the footpath, it's so easy.
"Oh but my bike cost $3000 - $10000 and it it can't handle bumps." well then why the f* would you pay ten grand for it? Sure as hell ain't gonna save that on parking. I have seen a guy do backflips and shit on his road-bike, and hop up big walls and everything, the reason you're paying so much money is so that your whole bike can be built out of titanium, carbon or some other lightweight, extremely STRONG metal. You can ride them over bumps, If I could buy a bike for $45 from Kmart and ride it over a bump, you can use your expensive ass masterpiece of engineering to do it. OR god forbid you learn how to bunny hop 10 centimetres if you ever needed to go up a gutter and for some reason could not use your extremely good stopping distance to slow down before that time.
I guarantee you would cut road accidents related to bikes right down to the ground if cyclists all just rode this way, sure people might still stack, but walking away from crashing into some grass or pavement is a lot different to getting hit by a several tonne construction of steel and then hitting the grass or the road. I have crashed my bike an uncountable amount of times doing jumps or whatever and I haven't ever been seriously injured. People who get hit by cars even just once, are usually not okay.
Ride your bike like you are a pedestrian and you will save time, and not die. f*ing cyclists.
