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@tbc
After nodding around Berlin today, I think I have a much greater appreciation for cycling in London. The same problems brought up time and again in this thread are also ubiquitous in Berlin - RLJers, people going too slowly, people RLJing and then going too slowly, getting undertaken at lights, watching people go up the inside of right-turning vehicles that are too big to see them. Plus some problems that are even worse here, like people cycling the wrong way up cycle lanes and not even really watching where they're going.
There really are some things that actually make me pretty grateful for being in London most of the time. The bike lanes in Berlin, that you don't have to use but are strongly encouraged to, both by general consensus and more openly by drivers, can be really narrow, very rutted, and most worringly, narrow and rutted and on a busy pavement. Cycling along them at speeds I'm used to riding at feels like I'm posing a much greater risk to others than I would be by going with the traffic. But when I did that, I had a load of vans and cars do that thing where they come too close behind, and then don't give you enough room when overtaking, to make the point. I also had a horrible woman in a Mercedes pull alongside me, wind down the window and shout 'there's a bike lane just there' in that really fucking annoying sing-song voice a lot of Germans tend to use when they are agitated.
It seems that German cyclist and town planners are slowly coming round to the idea that shared lanes are better and safer than segregation - in fact this was the leading article in the Berlin section of the Berliner Morgenpost when I arrived - but it actually made me appreciate London more.
tl;dr
It could be worse. There's not a place in the world where you're not going to come across dickhead cyclists. London isn't the worst place, neither is Berlin, and in every city I've been in, cycling is the healthiest, cheapest and most fun way to get around.
(This was much better, more concise, and more fluent in my head, and it also had a point).