red lights = stop
Comments
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Keep RLJing and cycling up the inside bendy buses and trucks guys and gals.
I work at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel - keeps us in business.
That's quite a melancholy raison d'etre, isn't it?0 -
louismichaels wrote:Keep RLJing and cycling up the inside bendy buses and trucks guys and gals.
I work at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel - keeps us in business.
That's quite a melancholy raison d'etre, isn't it?
By chance, I was by the hospital yesterday, and the junction of Whitechapel Road and New Street is absolutely manic for RLJers and dodgy bike/MTB manoeuvres. It looks like your work is very considerately coming to you...0 -
Homer J wrote:nomoreexcuses wrote:Next time i see one do it, i going to have words.
Why would you have words? You wouldn't pull a car driver over for jumping the lights? (Unless you're a copper)
FWIW i don't jump the lights, and it winds me up when cyclist do it, but it's not my place to go chasing them and having a word.
Well done.
You don't see MOTORISTS blantantly jumping RED LIGHTS(rare) but i see cyclists do it ALOT.
Whoever RED LIGHTS is sending the 'F*** OFF' and the 'road rules don't apply to me' message to the number of car drivers that see you each time. That means CAR DRIVERS build up a NO RESPECT to ANY CYCLIST. ALL cyclists get grouped in the same bracket by motorists, when lots do it. This is one of the reasons, they don't give you enough room, when they pass you.
If you get into the habit of stopping at red light, it becomes second nature and sends a signal, that you respect the road and other road users and your not a ****head. Cyclists are road users, that means road law applies to you too.
Cyclsts get a bad rap from car drivers as it is, one dislike of cyclists is because they don't pay road tax. Cyclists need more support as it is. Cyclists are vulnerable road users. Why aggravate motorists more and give them an excuse?
Everybody dislikes being caught at a red light. But it is the law to stop. Just get used to it.0 -
Homer J wrote:nomoreexcuses wrote:Next time i see one do it, i going to have words.
Why would you have words?
To explain the law of course
sherer wrote:when I started riding I just found it was easier to obey the rules of the road and stop at lights.
Yes :idea:0 -
nomoreexcuses wrote:Homer J wrote:nomoreexcuses wrote:Next time i see one do it, i going to have words.
Why would you have words? You wouldn't pull a car driver over for jumping the lights? (Unless you're a copper)
FWIW i don't jump the lights, and it winds me up when cyclist do it, but it's not my place to go chasing them and having a word.
Well done.
You don't see MOTORISTS blantantly jumping RED LIGHTS(rare) but i see cyclists do it ALOT.
Whoever RED LIGHTS is sending the 'F*** OFF' and the 'road rules don't apply to me' message to the number of car drivers that see you each time. That means CAR DRIVERS build up a NO RESPECT to ANY CYCLIST. ALL cyclists get grouped in the same bracket by motorists, when lots do it. This is one of the reasons, they don't give you enough room, when they pass you.
If you get into the habit of stopping at red light, it becomes second nature and sends a signal, that you respect the road and other road users and your not a ****head. Cyclists are road users, that means road law applies to you too.
Cyclsts get a bad rap from car drivers as it is, one dislike of cyclists is because they don't pay road tax. Cyclists need more support as it is. Cyclists are vulnerable road users. Why aggravate motorists more and give them an excuse?
Everybody dislikes being caught at a red light. But it is the law to stop. Just get used to it.
so when driving a car, do you stick to 70mph on the motorway then ?0 -
Actually I hate car drivers, all of them as every single one of them is always on the phone wilst driving, or driving too close to me, or speeding, or hurling abuse at me because I'm riding a bike.
Oh, hang on, I don't actually think like that any more than car drivers think all cyclists are the same for occasionally running the odd red light.
That rationale is total BS and nothing more than high horse, soap box, holier than thou crap. Why you should be so bothered about what other cyslists are doing is beyond me as none of us are faultless, in a car, or on the bike.
How many times do we have to stop in our cars because pedestrians keep walking across the road, despite the traffic lights turning green. It doesn't make me look down at pedestrians and tar them all with the same brush.
The sad truth is that the anti RLJ'ers need to get off their high horses and get a life.0 -
2 points.
The first I made earlier in this thread when I asked if anyone could name a traffic light that was there to regulate a cycling problem. I haven't seen any examples yet. The fact is that red lights are a motorised traffic solution (ok, the first ones existed in the time of horse-borne carriages) to a problem created by motorised traffic and its patent inability to share the road. Bikes are not the cause of red lights; lights are simply not there because of cyclists. Law-abiding cyclists, however, are included as traffic and are held up because of red lights. Though I stop at the damn things, I'm aware that the lights are only there because of motorised traffic. They may be there in part for cyclists' safety - but cyclists themselves are not the danger - lights are there to protect from motorised dangers.
And I think a lot of people think that riders stopping at red lights will silence the anti-cyclist lobby. No chance. Even if 100% of cyclists were to observe the rule in some imaginary fat chance universe, they'd still be the scapegoat.
Cyclists are the car driver's Other - where car drivers seek sedentary comfort, warmth and physical isolation from the road, the cyclist does the opposite. They also often have the temerity to wear their indecently body-hugging lycra underwear on the outside in public. (And the number of times the ''lycra-clad louts'' cliché pops up in the press is evidence of the scapegoating process. Just like the ''pay some road tax'' bleating is. Well, wearing lycra is not illegal and cyclists pay for the roads. But those facts are not going to stop the scapegoating.) In the car driver's dream, cyclists simply shouldn't be there, and this inversion of their world is accentuated when city cyclists manage to get to work quicker and more cheaply than car drivers. And this is compounded when they get out of the gutter where many drivers grudgingly think they belong. The mad fools even seem to do it for some kind of perverse pleasure!
So, even though I stop and follow the rules of the road, the red light issue seems more like a red herring to me.0 -
dmclite wrote:
so when driving a car, do you stick to 70mph on the motorway then ?
One-way constantly moving 20-50mph diiference traffic is much safer than trying to traverse sideways traffic that's not even expecting you.Escargot wrote:
The sad truth is that the anti RLJ'ers need to get off their high horses and get a life.
Carry on going through red lights and you won't have much of a life!0 -
nomoreexcuses wrote:Escargot wrote:
The sad truth is that the anti RLJ'ers need to get off their high horses and get a life.
Carry on going through red lights and you won't have much of a life!
:roll:
The point is I don't ride through red lights apart from the odd occasion when I go out at 7:00am on a Sunday morning and there is no one else on the roads. In busy times or when there is more traffic I do what is sensible and stop like everyone else. I don't ride through red lights when people are crossing and try to run them down, or ride through crossroads and force cars to stop/swerve. Any red light jumping is carried out with respect to the conditions of the road. Is this illegal ? Maybe, but what concern is it of yours to start pushing your views down someone elses throat ?
The amount of times I ride through red lights is probably once in 6 months so am not really defending something I do regularly at all. You jumped to that conclusion yourself. I'm merely highlighting the fact that the anti brigade really need to focus on something else more important instead of sneering down their noses at people exercising their rights to do as they wish.0 -
nomoreexcuses wrote:dmclite wrote:
so when driving a car, do you stick to 70mph on the motorway then ?
One-way constantly moving 20-50mph diiference traffic is much safer than trying to traverse sideways traffic that's not even expecting you.Escargot wrote:
The sad truth is that the anti RLJ'ers need to get off their high horses and get a life.
Carry on going through red lights and you won't have much of a life!
Answer ze question. :evil:0 -
nomoreexcuses wrote:dmclite wrote:
so when driving a car, do you stick to 70mph on the motorway then ?
One-way constantly moving 20-50mph diiference traffic is much safer than trying to traverse sideways traffic that's not even expecting you.Escargot wrote:
The sad truth is that the anti RLJ'ers need to get off their high horses and get a life.
Carry on going through red lights and you won't have much of a life!
I have to use give way junctions where poor visibility due to parked cars means they're much more dangerous than slowly rolling through a red light when I can see a hundred metres down the road.
Care to reconcile that with your myopic arguments?0 -
It like a trend. Light goes RED and they blast through it like it don't exist. Now you expecting me to defend every single RED light situation in country because i noticed lots of blatant RL'ing on open roads.
@_Brun_
Trying to send a good message not to RED light. Most that do, will do it anyways. Why would you post a rare situation of having to navigate a RL? That just weakens my original message.
It was an observation, dangerous to other road users as well and doesn't send a good message, but do what you will. You get there a few seconds faster, big deal.0 -
nomoreexcuses wrote:Why would you post a rare situation of having to navigate a RL? That just weakens my original message.
.
you're not the messiah, you're not even a very naughty boy.
not everyone shares your hard views on it, breathe in and out a few times and get over it0 -
deptfordmarmoset - thank you for making a point I was about to chuck in far more thoroughly than I'd have bothered.
For the avid anti-RLJers, the remaining justification - that jumping the red causes crashes - is not borne out by the traffic crash stats, which show a very very small number of incidents. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it. A rider running a red light can move out to a position where they can see oncoming traffic, and is small and manoeuvrable enough to get out of the way. Those attributes don't apply to cars, which is why we have traffic lights to control the lumbering tin boxes in the first place.
There are a couple or three spots in Bath - one of them a recently built cretinous rat's nest of sequential lights right by our offices - where doing what's convenient is also quicker and safer than waiting for the green to instruct confused bus drivers to mow you down.John Stevenson0 -
Some light you have to go through on red as they do not change for cyclists (only when a car etc comes along do they change). But the vast majority of lights I obey (95%+).
If I do rlg I have to know the junction, no oncoming cars etc and generally not much other traffic.
Traffic lights are now being set up by morons who seam to be only bothered about stopping traffic as much as possible. Driving or riding I hate going from red light to red light :evil: and the number of light that have been installed to control traffic for 2 hours a day but run all day and cause me to stop when I may be the only person on the junction :evil: I would not mind but they have put lights on round abouts.0 -
Having lights at some busy roundabouts isn`t a bad thing, you`re less likely to get hit by someone coming from the left and not stopping and if you`re coming from a quiet road you don`t have to wait as long. Lights can be your friend.Smarter than the average bear.0
