Quoted By:
In the roundabouts. It's always the roundabouts that causes the largest risks to cyclists.
I have had 3 close encounters in this roundabout over the past decade.
1. There is some sort of psychological thing going on when you remove traffic lights. Cars respect the red light as the ultimate authority because crossing the red light means they could get themselves killed.
Roundabouts don't have red lights, so you are leaving the decision up to the driver, and that is an increased chance of human error.
2. All car drivers start out by respecting the cyclists a lot, but over time they develop the thinking of
>oh boy that bike is sure taking his time
When you go though this thought process enough times, you will start affording yourself the discretion to go ahead and cut into the roundabout or exit the roundabout because the bike probably won't be fast enough to reach you and crash into you.
And 99% of the time they are likely right. and so this becomes routine eventually. But not always, there is the human error factor when they attempt to estimate how fast or slow your bicycle is. And that's when the crashes happen.
3. the danger is increased in the age of electic bicycles where even old grandmas can hit 35 km/h, this further fucks up the car drivers' ability to estimate speed because electric bicycles look just like any other bicycle and there is an element of deception on top of the human error that makes everything even worse.
