Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
Plus, we are talking about totally different magnitudes of danger here. Me riding my bike across the street after cars have stopped is no less safe then walking across. Drivers pulling into the crosswalk is exponentially more dangerous - literally putting lives on the line if they happened to do it at just the wrong time. I've seen it countless times where had I been ten or twenty feet further ahead of where I was, I would have been hit.
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Funny you should mention that, because that was going to be my exact arguement for the riding of your bike through a pedestrian cross walk.
Let's use a right turn on red example. I am turning right on red, but the intersection has a somewhat obstructed view. So to proceed safely I inch my car forward; slow enough that a pedestrian approaching at 5-8 km/h would easily have time to see me, and I would have time to also see him. By riding your bike on the sidewalk, you are now bringing a vehicle into play travelling at several times that speed, and also adding the extra margin of error into play of your stopping distance.
My near miss with a bike that had the greatest potential to be spectacular happened in a similar situation. I was turning onto MacLeod from a strip mall, and had a downward slope onto MacLeod and cars blocking my view of the street and the sidewalk. So I inched forward so that I was not posing a risk to pedestrians. However some guy on a bike was wipping down the sidewalk at around 30 km/h and we almost had a collision. The cyclist then proceeded to tear a strip off of me; thinking that I was in the wrong.
I'm sorry, but when I was working downtown for many months I was parking 5 km from work so I had a lot of ground to walk. And the ratio of near misses with bikes riding on the sidewalk far out weighed the number of cars who encroached on the crosswalk.