by Bagehot
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I want van drivers to stop trying to kill me as much as the next rider, but I don’t think confronting them into good behaviour is likely to work. I want bicycling to become boringly normal and un-rebellious, so that you don’t need Lycra and an attitude to take it up, and the roads become so infested with us that car drivers simply have to adapt to us and town halls realise that providing better cycle lanes might be a vote winner. I have ridden in countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands where cycling is a joy, and the secret is that grannies and men in suits are a part of the throng, and that glassy-eyed mother on the school run has her brood of children strapped into a bicycle built like a wheelbarrow, not a car built like a tank.
My route to work at The Economist is also used by lots of lone commuters in cars, many of them rather fast and powerful cars rumbling pointlessly in traffic jams, before roaring forwards at speed for, oh, 50 yards or so, when the way ahead clears. Do I think them twits? Yes, a bit. But I also own a car. Cycling to work is a choice for me, not an ideological act. I like bicycling, it is free, it is reasonable exercise, it does not rain as often as you would think, I know how long the journey will take and the Tube is horrid.
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https://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/04/cycling_londonoldId.20110412143744166
Biking in Baltimore