Women's Safety in Traffic

Really? I would have thought that it's a particularly ineffective way of getting a message across, and has the potential to get people's backs up.

how? why would anyone be annoyed at you for saying 'excuse me, but my wife was one of many people who have been killed doing exactly what you just did' ?

What I've seen more often from female riders is a sort of zoning-out, leading to a failure to predict something awful about to happen. Laura Ashley-type dresses and/or hi-viz seem to be the most strongly predictive of this.

I wish to emphasise that I'm talking very, very broad brush here - we all know many absolutely focussed female riders and plenty of distracted male ones (not least me, which is why I'm a pretty risk-averse rider these days).

w/o making a guess at gender patterns, there are a lot of cyclists in general who seem to think, if i just stick to the left of the traffic at all times and stop at lights, nothing can harm me, no need to pay any attention. i can ignore traffic, pedestrians, never signal or look around me, stick to the left and i'll be fine.

On the other hand, lots of car/van/truck/bus drivers are shit, so the riders who think they are safe if they keep 6 inches from the kerb are making a false assumption, while the idiot cyclists do at least seem to be taking some notice of the traffic some of the time.

+1