I don't always stop at red lights when on the bike. Years ago I used to get off and push the bike across, as a pedestrian, when it was safe. In more recent years, I feel it is safer and quicker to go across on red without walking with the bike. I also feel it is my reward and my prerogative for sacrificially and nobly leaving the car at home and for taking the bike to free up the road network for motorists who don't have my thoughtfulness, consideration and altruism!
In conversation with friends, colleagues and relatives, I do try and encourage these committed car addicts to, at least, let the cyclists go first, to be especially careful at roundabouts and to keep to this hierarchy:
- Motorists give way to cyclist and walkers.
- Cyclist must give way to walkers.
- Cyclists should be treated more as walkers than motorists. Two use human power and reduce NHS costs; one is taking our dwindling oil reserves and contributing to ever higher oil prices and rising global temperatures. What the carbon polluters take today, none of us will have tomorrow.
Motorists are a major part of the problem; cyclists are a major part of the solution. Cyclists are the true patriots who are preserving the nation's wealth, slowing the liquidising of our assets, and slowing the devastating effects of human induced, climate change. We are the true friend of the motorists. Motorists should be saluting us in grateful acknowledgement of our noble efforts, on their behalf, to keep that little more oil in the ground to enable them to keep driving that little bit longer!
I will forgo the salute if they only give me a wide berth and, like me, try to cut their car use before they are forced to do so by circumstances - later this century, I would think.
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