Study shows cyclists do not habitually break traffic laws

crazy-legs wrote:

There was a "study" (well, a very small one, basically nothing more than noted observations) at 2 major junctions in London a while ago where the researchers noted all the bikes and vehicles who jumped the lights. They found that in spite of the  fact that cyclists have far more opportunity to jump the lights than vehicles (ie cyclists can filter to the front of a queue of traffic and go through while a car that's a couple back in the queue doesn't have that chance) the percentages were actually very similar.

The manner of RLJ was also very different. Drivers tended to "amber gamble" - accelerating and rushing through as the lights turned to red - while cyclists tended to stop, wait and then RLJ in the few seconds before their phase went green (essentially getting a few metres head start on the starting grid of vehicles behind them) and obviously that is far safer than rushing through as the lights change.

Interesting article here by the excellent Bike Snob NYC writing for an outdoors website in the US:

https://www.outsideonline.com/2296681/ethics-breaking-traffic-laws

That Swedish one isn't too dissimilar

^This.

I cycle commute across Bristol every day, I see both motorists and cyclists go through red lights. But as crazy-legs says, cyclists tend to wait then go through slowly when it's clear, whereas motorists will speed up to try and get through whilst the lights are on amber.

Neither of these two things is actually particularly harmful as cyclists don't tend to go through reds into traffic (though I have seen that happen) and traffic lights tend to leave enough time between one set going red and the other going green, that it's unlikely there will be a collision if one car just goes through a red (though I have seen a collision between two cars because at least one car went through a red light.

It does amaze me though, red = stop, green = go. So many people struggle to follow this concept.

hirsute wrote:

Swedish cyclists only though? What infrastructure do they have in Sweden that we don't have ?

Elks. Abba. Gloomy middle-aged detectives. Naked fire-jumping festivals at midsummer. Gloomy film directors. Need I go on? If we had more of these things in the UK nobody would ever break traffic laws. Is that what we really want? It's a very high price to pay.