Aggression

So.... I moved to Bristol, UK a couple of months ago. Britain's first cycling city so it says. Massive funding for bike lanes and paths. Bike Friendly. Awesome. Just like Amsterdam. Would make a nice change from sharing bus lanes with buses and dodging blind drivers in Edinburgh.

Wrong wrong wrong. Edinburgh was a bike haven compared to this place. Bike City my ass. The bike routes are token efforts for the most part, as soon as there might be the slightest inconvenience to cars then the lane disappears, throwing you into a dual carriageway maelstrom or a multilane meat grinder. Either that, or the bike lane will be the bit with all the trees and street lamps in it making it worthless. Or the bike path will happily guide you across car lanes and multilane merges into the most dangerous part of the road.

To be fair some bits are good, but only when it won't cause the slightest hassle.

But the most striking thing by far is the aggression, not just from cars to bikes (worse than Edinburgh), but from the bikes too. Hardly anyone rides with lights, or stops for reds, or will minimise the room they take. Many cyclists will ride on the dual carriageway lane rather than on the massive smooth hard shoulder next to it, which I find unbelievably stupid. On a particularly dangerous bit of dual carriageway I was trundling along on the pavement, I know you're not supposed to but it was empty and wide and I was going slow with maximum pedestrian respect. The guy walking towards me shouted abuse and made his 2 big alsatians bark and jump at me. Never seen anything like it.

There are a lot of cyclists too, sometimes I end up riding in a herd of 10 in the central bits of the city. Nobody acknowledges each other. It's like being caught up in a civil war. Down here, bikes hate cars, cars hate bikes, bikes don't seem to like each other. Luckily my 20 mile daily commute and cross-USA action have made me about twice as fast as most commuters and I don't have to get stuck in it all, I just boost past on my silent racer like a falcon hunting pigeons. Mind you, an old guy on a knobbly tyred mountain bike did the same thing to me the other day. One day I'll be that old guy. Some day this war's gonna end.