Yes I would say you're right and this stuff should be obvious immediately to any adult, especially one who also knows how to drive a car.
But watching the behavior of "people on bikes" who are not "established cyclists" it seems as soon as everyone gets on a bike they initially go through a period of forgetting everything about how the road works, probably because they are super afraid of the cars. I don't think you really can blame them, fear is a very real & serious thing and it makes us all forget how to think things through. You have to get through a period where someone educates you and you get your bearings enough to get rid of the fear and have the basics ingrained enough you can start to think clearly about your behavior. It's no different than the process someone goes through in all kinds of other activities which can be super dangerous without training. People go through this process for sure with swimming for example.
I had the correct way of doing things drilled into me from an early age as I am not the first generation of my family to decide it's fun & worthwhile to ride thousands and thousands of miles/yr. So by the time I was an adult I just had to learn the extra stuff around big huge multi-lane roads and city intersections. I'd gotten all the basics drilled into me from at least a decade of riding on suburban roads and being told when I was doing it wrong.
I am trying to gradually introduce the rules of the road and correct cycling behavior to my own son now, that started right after he got off training wheels.
>Yes I would say you're right and this stuff should be obvious immediately to any adult, especially one who also knows how to drive a car.
>But watching the behavior of "people on bikes" who are not "established cyclists" it seems as soon as everyone gets on a bike they initially go through a period of forgetting everything about how the road works, probably because they are super afraid of the cars
You're being too generous.
There's a subset of the population that is simply lacking the ability to think about what other participants in traffic are doing and what they're trying to do and adjust their behavior accordingly. These people shit up the infrastructure for everyone else regardless of whether they're walking, on a bike or driving. They tend to leave near misses and accidents that are their fault but technically not their fault in their wake.
> But watching the behavior of "people on bikes" who are not "established cyclists" it seems as soon as everyone gets on a bike they initially go through a period of forgetting everything about how the road works, probably because they are super afraid of the cars. I don't think you really can blame them, fear is a very real & serious thing and it makes us all forget how to think things through.
How do new car drivers deal with driving around trucks and buses? They're told that they need to obey the rules of the road and some additional things like not passing a truck on the right. We need to take the same approach with new cyclists (follow the rules of the road, signal your turns and lane changes, yield when don't have the right of way, don't pass turning traffic on the side their turning, etc).
But watching the behavior of "people on bikes" who are not "established cyclists" it seems as soon as everyone gets on a bike they initially go through a period of forgetting everything about how the road works, probably because they are super afraid of the cars. I don't think you really can blame them, fear is a very real & serious thing and it makes us all forget how to think things through. You have to get through a period where someone educates you and you get your bearings enough to get rid of the fear and have the basics ingrained enough you can start to think clearly about your behavior. It's no different than the process someone goes through in all kinds of other activities which can be super dangerous without training. People go through this process for sure with swimming for example.
I had the correct way of doing things drilled into me from an early age as I am not the first generation of my family to decide it's fun & worthwhile to ride thousands and thousands of miles/yr. So by the time I was an adult I just had to learn the extra stuff around big huge multi-lane roads and city intersections. I'd gotten all the basics drilled into me from at least a decade of riding on suburban roads and being told when I was doing it wrong.
I am trying to gradually introduce the rules of the road and correct cycling behavior to my own son now, that started right after he got off training wheels.