Comment Re:So a bicyclist is safer..... (Score 2) 490
Except for one little thing. On your motorcycle you're moving at the same speed as traffic. A bicyclist Is slowing down the same same wave of traffic that managed to maneuver around it before the traffic light. Basically they're just slowing down even more traffic clogging up the same cars more than once.
I hear that argument a lot, but I've very rarely seen a line of cars behind a bicycle for any appreciable time. I've bike commuted most of my working life (~20+ years) and don't recall ever seeing such a situation in morning or evening rush hour traffic.
For the past 15 months or so I've had a 35 mile each way commute across LA county (from the Pasadena area to the South Bay- if it were permanent I'd move). I do it with a combination of freeways and surface streets (faster through downtown LA). Do you know what causes all the traffic? Cars. Do you know how many bicycles are on the 110 and the 101 and the 405 when they're locked up like parking lots? Zero. Same with the 110 when I get off the 110 and take surface streets through DTLA. On the surface streets, I share the lanes with a fair number of cyclists, and have never been delayed by a cyclist, and I get through DTLA on those streets shared with cyclists much faster than on the 110 clogged with motorists. If traffic is so heavy that cars are just creeping along, the cyclists can filter between the lanes just fine, and the drivers who need to pass them seem to pass them just fine.