From WashCycle:
Whenever you read an article about cycling in the city, or a discussion of transportation involving cycling it is highly likely that you’ll read a comment like this:
“I will ’share the road’ when cyclists start ‘obeying the traffic laws.’”
and this
“I always see bikers disobeying traffic signals. They always run red lights going across R Street and Connecticut Ave”
and this
Before encouraging people to cycle and spending millions of pounds of our money in the process, the Government should have down some groundwork to make roads safer for all of us. [WC: Sounds reasonable]
Making cyclists observe a few traffic laws - such as stopping at traffic lights and zebra crossings - would have been a welcome start.[WC: Really? You'd START with cyclists?]
In fact after Alice Swanson’s death, many comments on the post, DCist and elsewhere mentioned that something like this was bound to happen because of the illegal manner in which most cyclists ride. Despite the fact that there seems to be no indication that she did anything illegal.
Which leads to what I call “The Myth of the Scofflaw Cyclist”.
