Recent Chicago Reader article:

A heated debate recently erupted on social media about whether reckless driving and reckless biking are morally equivalent. It began, as so many of these wars of words do, with a post on Facebook.

"Wow! Very disappointed in Chicago's cycling commuters today," Erick "Iggy" Ignaczak wrote. He's a burly, bearded, 37-year-old residential painter who occasionally attends events organized via The Chainlink, a social networking site for local cyclists. Formerly a hard-core all-weather bike commuter, nowadays he drives a van to work.

That morning, Ignaczak wrote, he was driving downtown on Milwaukee Avenue—where bikes make up about 40 percent of all the traffic on the street during warmer months—when he had a couple of run-ins with reckless bicyclists. As he drove southeast on Milwaukee just south of Grand, he said, a bunch of fast riders "jumped out of the bike lane" and in front of his van to pass a slower cyclist.

Minutes later he was heading east on Kinzie, stopped at the stop sign at Clinton, and was about to turn south when a couple of the same riders passed him on the right and ran the sign. The cyclists, Ignaczak wrote, "are very lucky be alive. If I wasn't a cyclist commuter in a past life and didn't know what to watch for, they would be dead."

Drivers are legally obligated to make sure the coast is clear before making turns. But Ignaczak is correct that, unlike their counterparts in European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where the cycling rate is about 17 times higher, Chicago motorists often neglect to check for bikes before making turns or opening doors, which is why "right-hook" and "left-hook" crashes and doorings are common here. It also sounds like the cyclists truly were behaving irresponsibly and would've been at least partly to blame if they'd been struck and seriously injured or killed.

Other Chainlinkers posted to commiserate with Ignaczak. "Those are the jackholes that give us all a bad name," said Sarah Dandelles, who gets around mostly by bike.

Full Article:

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/reckless-driving-biking-debat...