Vehicular cyclists are the fucking worst. I find that they fall into two groups:
- "The John Forrester", generally oldhat nerds festooned with side mirrors and blinking lights and fluoro vests who are basically at the point of cosplaying as a car.
- "The Dentist", young and middle-aged guys with money for whom cycling is purely a sport and nothing else, who annually dump $20K into prebuilt bikes and clothing like it's nothing.
Either way they're almost 100% athletic white men who for some reason never picked up on the fact that cycling in a car culture is a near-perfect analogy / example of what it's like to be a marginalized minority and a first-hand demonstration of privilege. Instead they're defenders of the status quo - By way of their own athletic, gender, or monetary privilege - All the way to their bloody meat crayon deaths. They're that one asshole who shows up to the community board meeting about a new bike lane that will make cycling accessible for children, the elderly, and any person in between who is more risk-averse or less athletic than they are in order to speak against it "As a cyclist". Because to them battling for your life in traffic, being on the bleeding edge of death, breathing in truck exhaust from the shoulder of a stroad is a gatekeeping measure. They're masochistic elites, they rake pride in the danger that they put themselves in so much that they'd deny accessibility to anyone else unwilling to accept that danger.
Gordon Ramsey is an example of someone in the dentist group. A few years ago he very nearly got meat crayoned by a car while cycling in the US. He didn't provide the details of the crash but it was obvious from his injuries that he'd been hit from the side by a car or truck and likely went over the hood. His public plea in revealing this wasn't that the US needs to make roads safer for cyclists, or more accessible to people who don't have a group of equally wealthy friends to peloton around a foreign country with, maybe separating cars from cyclists so that the two may never conflict. His one and only adamant request was that we all wear a helmet. Cycling is wasted on these myopic asshats.
Oh bother, I've gone and ranted again.