WashCycle has a good post on scofflaw cyclists and the outsized anger directed at them by pedestrians and drivers. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a bit about jaybiking:

[A] better question is “why don’t drivers ‘jaydrive’?”


Is it because they love the law so much? Did you skip the previous section?


It’s because their risk/reward calculation is coming up with a different answer. And that makes sense. In a car you’re several feet farther back from the intersection and you’re often a foot or two lower, meaning you can’t see as well (I bet those on recumbents don’t jaybike as often as those on standard bikes). In a car you’re in a soundproof enclosure so you have no stereoscopic hearing. And if you make a mistake you aren’t as maneuverable as you are on a bike or on your feet. You can’t just ditch to the sidewalk. Driver’s don’t jaydrive because, in their own estimation, they can’t. But if they could, I’m sure they would.


Still, that doesn’t explain the anger. Drivers get — I feel — irrationally angry about this. After wondering why for so long, an anthropologist friend of mine helped me to understand. Running a red light is so dangerous for cars that it isn’t just illegal, it’s taboo. You’re breaking a social construct. Which means people find it objectionable and abhorrent. So if education is needed, maybe it’s needed to explain why it’s safer for cyclists to do this than for drivers.


[...]


The way to end jaybiking violations is to decriminalize them. [...] Idaho has changed its law — and California is considering it — to allow cyclist to treat stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs.

I agree with all of this, although it doesn’t really apply to me any more: over the past few months I’ve become a very, very good citizen cyclist.

It’s not that I think patiently waiting for a red light to change is making me or anyone else safer — it’s just that I can’t stand the thought that I might provide grist for those who whine about bicyclists’ lawlessness. Besides, the instinctive anger that drivers feel upon seeing a bicyclist is no doubt that much more intense when they can’t put their fingers on a handy excuse for why the biker’s presence infuriates them.

My traffic safety habits are now entirely spite-based.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.