Ya no one really gets it, these laws and the application/ enforcement of said laws are put in place to protect life and property. What is going to destroy more property and lives? The answer is cars, and that is why they are policed differently from bicycles. Can you imagine a cop having a bike pulled over for not stopping at a trail sign while a 3500 dually rumbles past the cop and bike that are pulled over at 70 mph in a 45 and smashes in to a kid a mile away? The outcry would be huge. How do you tell the parent of the dead kid that the cop was busy ticketing a bike or else they could have gunned the truck and pulled them over before they got to the child?
Bicyclists fined $195 for stop sign violations
- Thread starter DSMCy
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Ya no one really gets it, these laws and the application/ enforcement of said laws are put in place to protect life and property. What is going to destroy more property and lives? The answer is cars, and that is why they are policed differently from bicycles. Can you imagine a cop having a bike pulled over for not stopping at a trail sign while a 3500 dually rumbles past the cop and bike that are pulled over at 70 mph in a 45 and smashes in to a kid a mile away? The outcry would be huge. How do you tell the parent of the dead kid that the cop was busy ticketing a bike or else they could have gunned the truck and pulled them over before they got to the child?
One disctinction I'd like to make in this thread, there is a big difference between a "cyclist" and "a person on a bike"...sounds like the CB incident where the guy died was a "person on a bike".
Debatable. It's a problem, yes, but is it a big enough problem to warrant redirecting resources from enforcing automobiles' compliance with the rules when automobile/cyclist collisions are an extremely small share of traffic accidents and are usually the fault of the motorist? That suggests that we're better off increasing enforcement of automobiles rather than coming down harder on bicycles instead.
Maybe one day we can live in a world where a person on a bike is just that.........
semi
I specifically talked about what I know here in Minnesota and your link puts the breakdown of Cyclist/Motorist fault in Minnesota at 49%/51%. That sounds to me like they should certainly be cleaning up some of that idiot behavior since half of the accidents were deemed to be the fault of cyclists.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
We're still talking <2% of all traffic fatalities (and an even smaller percentage of all traffic accidents)...regardless of who's at fault, how can you justify increasing enforcement for such a relatively minor problem?
Sports analogy: you're coaching an Iowa State basketball squad playing a team that, inexplicably, contains both LeBron James and Mike Gessell. Do you adjust your defense to contain Gessell, who on his best day ever has <2% of LeBron's talent, or does your strategy address the real threat?
