Public awareness campaign suggestion

Gorillaman

I was talking to a friend last night- very intelligent guy, rarely unreasonable and generally pretty easygoing. The topic of cycling to work came up and his comment was 'some cyclists are absolute lunatics- riding in the middle of a lane and stopping the traffic' and was obviously pretty irritated by it. On my explanation for why cyclists do that - 'it's your 30 seconds of time, or me risking my life by letting cars zoom past me within a couple of inches' - he understood. Could one of the cycling campaign groups not put together a publicity campaign explaining the reasoning, preferably backed up with some stats on whether riding primary is safer?

This would massively reduce the anger many drivers feel towards cyclists, thus reducing incidents of 'buzzing' by cars and road rage incidents where drivers attack cyclists (and vice versa). It would also generally improve awareness of cycling on the road and increase safety.

Any thoughts?

shouldbeinbed

No it wouldn't.

It's an awful lot different explaining face to face with someone you know as opposed to convincing an anonymous audience, most of whom don't give a stuff for bikes, never ride the roads and are completely indifferent to the feelings of a complete stranger that is in their way and can't possible be going anywhere even half as important as they are.

spen666

shouldbeinbed wrote:

No it wouldn't.

It's an awful lot different explaining face to face with someone you know as opposed to convincing an anonymous audience, most of whom don't give a stuff for bikes, never ride the roads and are completely indifferent to the feelings of a complete stranger that is in their way and can't possible be going anywhere even half as important as they are.

You'd better tell that to all those who advertise on TV/ radio etc - advertising doesn't work- shouldbeinbed proves that

shouldbeinbed

spen666 wrote:

shouldbeinbed wrote:

No it wouldn't.

It's an awful lot different explaining face to face with someone you know as opposed to convincing an anonymous audience, most of whom don't give a stuff for bikes, never ride the roads and are completely indifferent to the feelings of a complete stranger that is in their way and can't possible be going anywhere even half as important as they are.

You'd better tell that to all those who advertise on TV/ radio etc - advertising doesn't work- shouldbeinbed proves that

eh, how do I prove it???? are you reading what i'm writing or just cherry picking the odd word and making the rest up to suit the point you want to make?

Advertising obviously works or they wouldn't do it - I didn't say it didn't work, I do however dispute the OP's assertion that

This would massively reduce the anger many drivers feel towards cyclists,

it may have some effect in the same way that the adverts in the middle of Coronation Street has some effect but massively?

I don''t think so and I don't think Heinz shift 13 odd million extra tins of beans or bottles of tomato sauce the day after they've advertised mid Corrie or Eastenders.

To be honest I think the type of person that feels anger towards a cyclist will feel that anger no matter what.
In my experience most non bikey people are overwhelmingly ambivalent towards us, The number of cars passing me vastly outweighs the catcalling I get. Occasionally they may get frustrated when stuck behind us in traffic or see us as a nuisance and getting in their way for any number of reasons - some of which may well be the cyclists fault or they may just be venting after a bad day.
They seem to be picking on us as we can hear them whereas other drivers in their own metal boxes don't.

I've had more ragging from you on here over a few posts than from years worth of motorists on thousands of miles of riding.

Porgy

shouldbeinbed wrote:

[are you reading what i'm writing or just cherry picking the odd word and making the rest up to suit the point you want to make?
.

That's the one - that's exactly what spen does.

spen666

Gorillaman wrote:

......... It would also generally improve awareness of cycling on the road and increase safety.

Any thoughts?

shouldbeinbed wrote:

No it wouldn't.

It's an awful lot different explaining face to face with someone you know as opposed to convincing an anonymous audience, most of whom don't give a stuff for bikes, never ride the roads and are completely indifferent to the feelings of a complete stranger that is in their way and can't possible be going anywhere even half as important as they are.

Shouldbeinbed, you now seem to be suggesting that you are talking about the anger towards cyclists, although you make no mention of this in your post.

you also seem to be talking about it not making massive differences . Again you make no mention of this in your post


It seems the cherry picking is coming from you, along with the insertion of things into your post that you never said.

What you mean and what you say (in earlier post) are not the same it seems

Porgy

and then he accuses you of what he's just been doing.

shouldbeinbed

spen666 wrote:

yaddy yaddy

and clever editing of gorillaman's OP to remove the bit where s/he talks about massively reducing the anger towards cyclists before berating me for doing that in reponse :roll:

Spen you do know that we can see the original posts as well as you don't you?

I was responding to exactly these isues made in the OP immediately above mine.

apologies for not requoting what was already there for all to see and to which there was nothing else that I could have been responding given they were posts 1 & 2 on the thread. I thought it was pretty obvious to what I was referring.

I'm often on here on my netbook and the endless cycle of repeated quoting ever longer riposts making for single pages that couldn't print out onto an entire roll of Andrex, but only contain half a dozen actual posts is difficult to follow the train of and extremely irritating on a small screen. a lot of the time a 10 page thread could be condensed into 5 with a bit of considerate quote edits.

sorry slight thread drift with that bit.

(edited x 1)