Safety Tips for Noobs

Assume that other road users are unaware of your presence.

Assume that other road users are indifferent to your presence.

Assume that other road users are resentful of your presence.

Assume that other road users are intent on ending your presence.

As long as you are not choosing a career in cycling training ;)
I need confidence boost and inspiration from time to time so reading that other road users would happily run me over is the last thing I need to hear.

That's not really what fudge said, but nonetheless that advice is redolent of Cyclist Inferiority Syndrome. Cycling is a low-risk activity that billions of people undertake every day. Compared to how much it is done, how many miles people cover, how many trips they make, there are very few collisions.

There are still too many, of course, and there are people who do not discharge their responsibility towards others in traffic adequately. But overall there is no cause for excessive alarm on an everyday basis, especially not in generalised assumptions towards other people. It only stereotypes and causes unnecessary problems.

The fact is that it would only be in excessively rare instances of road rage that anyone would set out to hit you. Most people in cars want to get through their day without problems, just like you.

Of course, you would be absolutely right to suggest caution and circumspection. But I think as I've said a couple of times now in reply to such posts, a generally defensive and victimised attitude speculating about serious physical injury or death is not helpful.

In fact, one thing that is essential is good communication with other road users. Think of traffic as a social environment like any other, except that in interacting with most motorised participants in traffic (I quite like translating this German expression, "Verkehrsteilnehmer" into English directly, even if it may read a little unevenly at first), it's as if you're trying to talk to someone who has headphones on and can't hear you all that well.

That is one of the main things that makes traffic scary for people (whether in cars or not): The fact that quite a few people are hidden away in cars and barely visible. At a very basic level, we usually want to interact with people around us in a meaningful way, and if they flow around us in such great numbers (e.g., in London) at burst speeds, that can be very hard to handle. It's only understandable, as so many aspects of social interaction on which we normally rely in everyday life are effectively impaired and we have to make an extra effort to overcome them.

As cyclists, we've got the best of all worlds, anyway. We can move swiftly and efficiently, and we are out there in public, visible for all to see. Even when people complain about cyclist behaviour, they usually complain about the person, whereas you so often hear people say things like 'the car couldn't see me' or 'the car jumped the red light'.