Re: Daytime running light popularity

On 10/28/2024 7:51 PM, Roger Merriman wrote:

Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 10/28/2024 5:40 PM, Roger Merriman wrote:

Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On another forum, a friend of mine claimed Ohio drivers were
hostile to cyclists. She lives and rides around big, sprawling Columbus.
I pointed out that I find our area motorists to be very cooperative. In
general, I think big cities generate aggressive driving.
>

Columbus is by no definition a large city it’s barely over 2 million
people, that’s a fairly standard city size NewYork with 20 ish million or
london with 15 million are large city’s.

"Large" is relative, of course. Columbus is the largest city by
population in Ohio and the 14th largest in the U.S., out of about
20,000. I'd say it qualifies as large by our standards.
>
My point was general and comparative - that largER cities seem to have
more aggressive motorist than smallER cities. I suspect that trend holds
true even when comparing what you'd call two mid-sized cities.
>

I’d to be honest consider Youngstown a town, it’s about the same size as
and history as the largest of the Welsh Valley towns, and if anything
larger cities with more cyclists I’d expect to drivers to be more
comfortable and familiar with encountering cyclists and other active
travel.
 Whereas a smaller city or town are more car centric, much less familiar and
used to the idea of driving everywhere, driving into for example Bristol or
even though it is if one is driving a perfectly reasonable choice, London
is a entirely different proposition and would take one many hours!

In the other forum where I discussed this, I made some guesses as to why I've have almost no motorist problems. One is that this is an older city, meaning much of it is built on a grid plan. That naturally gives multiple choices for routing, and often makes quieter parallel streets available. Inner ring suburbs are not grid plans, but often still provide somewhat winding alternatives to main arterials. And I've wondered if the fact that cyclists are uncommon makes motorists sit up and take notice, as in "Whoa, it's a guy on a bike! What should I do?" (I think that's especially true when I'm obviously at lane center.)
A further couple details about our metro area in particular: Due to the well known collapse of our steel industry in the late 1970s, population has shrunk; but the number of roads has not, so traffic inside the city is lower.
My wife and I like to watch Rick Steves travel videos. In one or two of them, he's talked about how charming and well preserved some ancient European towns are, specifically because economic problems caused their "development" and modernization to stop. Sometimes there are benefits to economic downturns.
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- Frank Krygowski