Speeding on a bicycle is hard to accomplish. If you speed on a bicycle, the speed limit is very likely "ridiculously low". Except downhill in residential areas, granted. But then again, 35 in a 30 zone is also considered fairly normal for a car, too, so...
I think that is part of the problem. Let me explain. The standard speed limits have been set for cars. The only speed limits a bicycle can realisticly break are the 30/40/50 kph, and the last two are not exactly easy to beat too.
So it is perfectly normal for a cyclist to think that any speed limit is way too far for him and never pay attention to it. But this expands; since beating the marked speed limit requires skill and dedication most of the time, most of the cyclists will go on thinking that they can not speed at all, so spped in itself will not be considered important, because always legal, and so they will be riding at whatever speed they want.
Unfortunately, the speed limits are made for cars driving on car lanes, with car tyres, car suspensions, car brakes. Not for bicycles riding on kerbs or bike lanes and for which slowing down, braking and direction changes can be tricky, difficult, or even impossible. Even in case they actually have good brakes and/or skilled riders, which is not granted at all, as we can see everyday.
The fact is that bikes should have their own speed limits, which they haven't. Cars' speed limits are far too high for bicycles to be meaningful in any way. Apart from 30 kph, maybe.
Are you suggesting the limits for bicycles should be lower? And then you would complain about the cyclists holding you up?
They already do, when they are not sport cyclists in lycra running every yield sign or red light imaginable (at least in my neighbourhood). Bicycles slow me down constantly. Yet I understand that they can not really go that much faster.
Bicycles and cars are very different beasts. Too different for sharing the same spaces. I already said it in the last two to three pages of comments in this thread (when speaking of cycling boxes at traffic lights), I think bicycles and cars are not made to be together on the road. Forcing them together will bring dedicated rules to favour bicycles, and this will have idiotic consequences like raising cars' pollution and fuel consuption, raising the chance of dangerous situations, slowing down traffic, raising angryness against bicycles and generally reducing life quality for everyone.
I also said, somewhere, that bicycles should be forced to slow down to pedestrian speed in some situations, like at a crossing with a road, for example, in order to give cars the possibility of actually seeing them and slow down to let them cross the road.
I understand and truly appreciate your light touch of irony and your relaxed disposition in this discussion. But I really am quite different from the stereotypical bicycle hater.
"you must not go faster than your vehicle and your capabilities allow to do safely" rule anyway.
Speed limits exist exactly because people are ususally unable to tell by themselves what that "safe speed" might be. Cyclists are the same people who drive cars or ride moptorbikes: they'll make the same mistakes.
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Well, we don't actually know that. Without having been there, how can you tell it wasn't safe enough to do 35mph?
The real question is can you tell if it was? I have read Strelok16's words and comments. Those are the only elements we have. If you want, I can turn the thing by saying that in a residential 30 mph area where the speed limit is appropriately set for cars, a bicyles doing 35 (or even 31 mph) would be not just illegal, but also wrong.
Maybe he had phenomenal brakes, superior skills, yada yada - all the arguments people make towards higher car speed limits.
Wouldn't we make fun of a cyclist saying this kind of crap like we do when a driver does?
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It's harder to speed on a bicycle than you seem to think
Sport cyclists around here are very likely to be found riding at around 25 mph when they are pushing. Probably the very light downhill of some of the roads where I usually see that happen is helping them significantly, but it's not unusual at all.
Still, I think that's too fast for them in normal traffic, I don't feel they would be ready or able to stop in a short distance in case of problems, or even to keep the bike on its wheels. I might be wrong, clearly, but I think they will require much much more space than I would, at the same speed.