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Hello /n/,
I'm wondering if you all have some ideas on how to deal with the cager culture in suburbia. I live in a medium sized city of 100,000 people that was designed entirely around cars like most of America. I've lived here since 2007 and have been biking since 2010, starting first as a way to get to work, then as a way to run just about any errand that can be run on a bike. Now I bike about 3k miles a year around town. I still have an use motor vehicles, but those are mostly for out of town trips.
Over the last decade, the city has added a few new bike paths that are pretty nice, and bike lanes have me pretty covered for traveling east-west, but in order to get to any of those paths or lanes I have to travel just a few miles on one of the north-south roads. These roads are all 4 lane, no shoulder, cager nightmares. It used to not be a problem, people would just drive into the empty lane and wave as they passed me. Now people honk, yell "use the sidewalk!" or even do intentional close calls where they get as close as possible to me while flooring the gas. Most of these aggressive encounters happen while I'm just pedaling down a rather empty road and they have an extra lane they could just easily go into. The fact of the matter is that over the last few years the mentality has shifted any many people in this city would like to honestly see me dead just because I'm riding a bike.
As we all know, the sidewalk is a nightmare. It's an uneven, broken stretch of entrances to big-box stores and would be suicide to ride. The recent shift in mentality has made me almost throw in the towel on riding, which is a shame because it's something I love so much. With almost daily aggressive encounters it's just not fun anymore, and I think someone might intentionally kill me in the process.
Has anyone found a way to deal with this? Any luck talking to city planners to make the town more bikeable? It just needs some way to get north and south without angering the drivers.
