You can bet that more cyclists will have time and composure enough to then be able to stop at red lights and stops signs, just as they do in The Netherlands.

But punting to the rogue biker thing, as it *always* seems to happen when bike infrastructure is being discussed, completely stifles the actual discussion about bike infrastructure.

See, when a new parking structure is built (for example), the topic that is talked about is whether it will make car driving more efficient or not. Critics such as most people on this site, don’t start relaying their anecdotes such as “but I was almost ran over by a car last weekend” or “car drivers I see never fully stop at a stop sign”. That is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion whether the construction of new car facilities or the policy of encouraging more driving, is good and should be pursued by the city or state or country or not.

It’s almost as if many people feel that bikers don’t “deserve” more investment in bike infrastructure, until all of them completely obey all traffic laws, at all times. This is a huge double standard, given the enormous subsidies car driving and parking currently receives, despite the number of rogue and reckless drivers and the number of deaths cars cause, mostly by bad or drunken driving. It further cements the entitlement car drivers feel to be given free reign on the roads and relegating everybody else to picking through the crumbs of funds that are left behind by them.

On the other hand, my wife walks to work from North Beach to FiDi and almost always comes home with a story of near misses. I trust her judgement as a ped so the biker was probably at fault, but she isn’t out to take every bike off the street because of this. She just becomes that much more aware of her surroundings.

This just goes to show that “near-misses” aren’t so cut and dry. As long as we have to share the limited public ROW then there are going to be instances that upset one party or the next.

Which leads me to what Jamison said, you can’t just harp on the SFBC because you are mad at some biker. You should be supporting SFBC because they promote safe biking and programs that teach it.

When I am on my bicycle, I cede the right of way when it is not mine. When I drive my car, I try to plan a few extra minutes into my schedule so I’m not tempted to drive at unsafe speeds or make unsafe turns. And when I walk, I make sure I don’t step in front of moving objects, and I don’t cross against lights. I even wave cars through four-way stops if they’ve arrived at the intersection before me. It’s called taking your turn.

Courtesy and respect. Infrastructure, infrastructure. Courtesy and respect.

What does “almost hit” mean? Does it mean a cyclist has acted maliciously or recklessly, as Troy and his ilk imply, by aiming his bike at some hapless and random pedestrian?

Or might it mean the pedestrian simply failed to look for cyclists, became startled and spooked when one of those cyclists he never sees passed closeby, and projected his own cluelessness onto the cyclist? “He didn’t see me!” Really? How do you know that?

Cyclists do not intend to hit pedestrians–we’d be hurt just as badly, or worse, in a bike-ped collision. Cyclists also don’t ignore pedestrians, because we cannot afford the luxury of pedestrian-style cluelessness. If we did, we would crash into pedestrians all the time. Yet the statistics simply do not bear out that sort of collision rate.

“Almost hit” is a pedestrian’s-eye-view of a traffic scenario the cyclist almost certainly saw coming for quite some time–assuming the pedestrian didn’t just fling his body out into the roadway maliciously or recklessly, right Troy? “Almost hit” means nobody was actually hurt.

I thought what Proffessor Teits said was they walked “three miles across country paths and sat in front of a pond and then walked back–actually quite nice”, not to sit in front of a pub.

Your candidates?