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@i_am_lono
Wordy rant begins.
I love shouting at other cyclists acting like tools as much as the next face-palming man, but it rarely seems to make any difference in a broader sense. To whit, watching a shoal of 8 nodders (a group of backpacked turistas) sail through a set of reds this morning in Sunny Leith, right into a 3 way junction and a potential car-based mashing scenario, got me thinking about a particular brand of lemming-ness that seems to categorize this frustrating breed. Being of the mind that most city centre road-users are capable of entirely random and dangerous manouevres - and an advocate of defensive, assertive riding - it seems staggeringly naive to trust that the rider in front of you knows what s/he is doing, especially since that person has gone through a red light with nary a glance to the left nor right. Lo, all but one of them - the final nodder braking heavily, performing the world's shittest endo and teetering in the middle of the junction - carried on through, entirely sure of their brave leader's spatial mastery. Critical Mass, you ain't.
Perhaps it is, as I have found with daily riding through = but mainly around - Edinburgh's tartan-touting packs of nodders/peds, either a magical forcefield mentality (with the presumption that all traffic will stop for you, cf. the pedestrian right-of-way law as illustrated by Bill Hicks), or an inability to recognize the throbbing mass of traffic/danger in tramwork-blighted Auld Reekie and your fleshy part in it. Either way, at least 5 of them that followed their pal merrily through the lights must have someone looking out for them. Apparently Edinburgh now has the highest amount of cycle commuters in Scotland - yay! - but I see dozens daily whose lives would be enriched/extended/saved by cycle training.
Wordy rant ends.