[Ebbc-Talk] Populations Running Red Lights

> it has nothing to do with bicyclist behavior and attitudes,
> unless you illogically use others' behavior to justify your
> own.  That's good kindergarten-level thinking.

=v= My own?  Appeals to logic work better without _ad_hominem_
allegations and aspersions.

=v= My background is sociology, so I view things in a social
context.  The examples I gave reflect the folkways and mores of
the general motoring population.  These are embodied in social
institutions, from roads designed to accommodate speeding to
law-enforcement policies that overlook most law-breaking, and
indeed, an entire parallel body of law and court system which
reduces deadly crimes to infractions and expedites the handling
of large numbers of offenders.

=v= To me it makes no sense to discuss one transportation mode's
adherence to one of these infractions without taking this wider
context into account.

=v= I don't know whether "bicyclist behavior and attitudes" is
a reflection of your background in psychology, but the singular
usage is only appropriate for a case study.  To understand the
biking population, plural phrases are a better place to start.
To my eyes, reality is more along the lines of X% of bicyclists
running red lights, Y% of those surveyed justified it for reason
Z, controlling for a dozen or so other variables -- and compared
with percentages of motorists, pedestrians, whatever.

=v= Human behavior is multivariate, and patterns that emerge
are intersections of multiple probability distributions.
There's not one monolithic bicyclist uniformly doing a thing
because of one particular (negative, imputed) state of mind.

>> =v= Yet bicyclists are the ones with the entitlement problem.
> I don't see how you can honestly deny it.

=v= I would say that some percentage of the bicyclist population
harbors some variety of a feeling of entitlement.  I've seen no
research indicating whether these is less than or greater than
those of the motoring population, or the population overall, nor
whether they have any significant correlation to any particular
behavior such as running red lights.

=v= Without this research, we're just tossing anecdotes and
unfounded opinions around.  Which, as I said at the outset
of this thread, does nothing about addressing anything that's
actually a problem.
    <_Jym_>
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