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JoB: I’m glad we agree on putting in more dedicated bike lanes/paths. I retract my earlier statement about bicyclists never being rude. I don’t really see it (or maybe I just don’t notice it) as much as you do, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. I guess bicyclists are capable of being rude, just like everyone else.
I do think you’re overstating the problem of bicycles hogging the road, but it’s not because you’re anti-bike or anything. Rather, it’s because of your particular driving habits and your take on the “rules of the road.”
Based on your comments on this and other threads (e.g., the zipper merge thread) I am assuming that you have a very conservative approach to both merging with and passing other traffic, whether a bicycle is involved or not.
That’s fine. However, there is a trade-off when you do that. If you’re going to wait until you’ve got what you consider to be a comfortable space in which to pass the bicyclist, then you should expect to spend a little more time behind bicyclists. You should also expect traffic to pile up behind you a bit.
You never did answer my question about where you were on Fauntleroy, exactly, when you were stuck behind the bike for a mile, but I’m going to assume it was southbound, because southbound has got the longest stretches without dedicated bike lanes. (If there was a dedicated bike lane where you were at, there’s no reason why the bicyclist wouldn’t have been in that.)
In any case, on those parts of Fauntleroy with no dedicated bike lane there are always two travel lanes, one of which is always a sharrow.
The photo below shows a sample stretch of southbound Fauntleroy (7100 block), with the sharrow + car lane configuration.
Let us imagine that your vehicle is the darkly colored car inside the circle. As you can see, there’s plenty of room for a car to pass a cyclist on that stretch of road—check out the motorcyle in the NB lane for perspective—and a bicylist would have to be straddling the sharrow AND the car lane to prevent you from passing for a whole mile. But honestly, why would any cyclist hog two lanes like that, when he could have his own full lane (the sharrow) to occupy? It makes no sense.
What I think is happening here is that you are being SO cautious that you won’t go around the bicyclist even when there is enough room to do so safely.
And again, that’s your decision. But try not to be surprised when you don’t see the bicyclist pulling over to the far side of his lane to accommodate you. (Why should he?) And don’t be irked at the drivers behind you honking their horns and “riding your tailpipe,” as you’ve put it. Because those other drivers are just doing what comes natural.
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