My Beef with Bicycles

I don't have anything against bicycles or bicycle riding, per se. I've had several bikes throughout my life and have enjoyed riding them, despite some minor mishaps and scrapes and bruises from falling. My beef is about sharing the road with bicyclists. I don't think I would have this issue if two things happened - all roads had bicycle lanes on them AND bicyclists actually followed the rules of the road.

Before moving here to the San Jose area, I lived near the "Bike Capital of the Northwest" and was used to sharing the road with bikers, even though it annoyed me. At least most of them knew the rules of the road and followed them, even though most of the streets in that area (Redmond) were not built to easily include bikers in traffic. Now that I'm in California, my patience with bicyclists has plummeted, mostly due to the idiotic things they do to make driving around here even more difficult than it already is. Some of the things I've seen include bicyclists riding on the opposite side of the road, not stopping for stop signs, not wearing helmets, using a car lane when a bicycle lane is available, and asking me to get off the sidewalk so they can ride their bike on it. This last one doesn't hinder the flow of traffic, but pisses me off just because of the "rudeness" factor. Aside from all of this, I've yet to see a bicyclist able to keep up with the minimum posted speed limits on most streets, which makes it tricky to get around them in congested traffic where there aren't bike lanes.

In searching for bicycle accident statistics, the most recent data I found was from 2002 on the US Department of Transportation website. Here are a few interesting factoids:

• The first automobile accident in the US was in New York City in 1896, when an automobile collided with a bicyclist.
• More than 47,000 pedabicyclists have died in traffic crashes in the US since 1932.
• Pedacyclists accounted for 12% of all nonmotorist traffic fatalities in 2002.
• Pedacyclists under the age of 16 accounted for 24% of all pedacyclists killed and 39% of those injured in traffic accidents in 2002, which is down from 1992 (42% of those killed).

It looks like, from the data, that pedacyclists' deaths have decreased over the years. Even so, there are still too many injuries and fatalities on the road for bicyclists. This website gives some interesting statistics on bicycle accidents. Clearly, both motorists and bicyclists have a ways to go before it is actually safe for bicyclists to share the roadway with motorists.