Monday 15 April 2013

Why do mondays bring out the haters?

As CycleHatred shows, Monday mornings appear to be the time when most of the "fucking cyclists I hope they all die" rants crop up.

Why?

Probably because it is the first day the posters have been stuck in a rush hour traffic jam after the weekend. The first day of trying to get across a city on a deadline while everyone else has the same idea; the first day of getting frustrated and angry about sitting around while nothing happens because some bastard has blocked the junction you want to get across.

Later on in the week, the car commuters have become used to this, so only whine about specific bicycles, rather than their very presence on the road.

But why the hate for bicycles? If you follow up with the posters, it's often about them taking up space "hogging the road", "holding us up". They are an obvious outgroup to blame for this experience of having to sit in traffic.

There's also that situation where there's an almost clear stretch of road from one set of lights to the traffic jam behind, where the driver could put their foot down, get up to 30 mph for a few seconds, and pretend to themselves that driving is a fast way to travel at rush hour.

What's not so obvious is that 29% of morning traffic that is the school run parent, nobody tweets "fucking lazy parents not walking their kids to school". Even if they are visible, with the kids in the back each staring at their personal DVD player embedded in the rear headrests of the front two seats, they can't be blamed for "hogging the road" as the driver behind isn't fucking stupid enough to demand they get to the side to let others past.

And of course, nobody is stupid enough to say "fucking commuters, always blocking the road at rush hour", as that would mean having to acknowledge that they themselves were to blame for being stupid enough to drive into or across a city at peak hours and expecting the journey to be anything other than a crawl between traffic jams.

This is probably also why so many of the local-rag cyclist haters rant on about removing traffic lights.

The fuckwit haters seem to blame the traffic lights for causing the jam, missing the point that the traffic lights are to try and ensure that people heading in different directions get across the city. The jams are because there are too many people trying to do this.

Trying to get the haters to clarify their hate over Twitter has proven futile.

What else?

Well, what are our goals. Is it:

  1. Stop the haters ranting on twitter.
  2. Stop the haters trying out punishment passes, cutting in before left hooks or the next traffic jam.
  3. Have them trying to cycle themselves and so stop not only hating the cyclists, but becoming less of a problem to the entire city.
#3: get off their fat arses and cycle in must be the ideal goal. 

How to do that? 

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