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Parisian cyclists have won the right to go through red lights following a fierce debate over their claim that the move would reduce the risk of road accidents.

A three-year campaign by cyclists’ associations — which say it is idiotic for them to stop at traffic lights — bore fruit when the Government published a decree authorising councils to change the rules.

If only our leading New York advocacy groups were similarly in touch with the murky reality of cycling in city streets. Nothing is black or white, certainly not whether it is always wrong or dangerous to cross against a light as a pedestrian, or a cyclist. As everyone who walks knows, half the time when you disregard signals it is to avoid conflicts with impatient motorists. You see that the street is blissfully, momentarily clear and you cross it—why should you not?

Our traffic laws are a central component of a system that kills hundreds of New Yorkers a year, while other cities enjoy far lower fatality rates. People who think that our laws are beyond criticism, that questioning current law is anything other than healthy democratic engagement—they need get their heads checked. Perhaps their crash helmets are on too tight.

One reporter assured readers that biking doesn’t lead to excessive sweatiness, another found that her nighttime ride on a busy road wasn’t as perilous as expected, and a number of them found that walking to the station made them see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes.

The only time I sweat because of cycling is when I get all hot and bothered and from being asked dumbass questions about it. Including whether I arrive at work drenched in sweat from a casual 25 minute ride. I arrive in the same condition as my coworkers who have traveled by train, foot, or cycling. We all experience the weather—and it happens to be winter out there at the moment. That this preoccupation with sweat continues year round shows just how disconnected some people are from the world outside their houses and cars. They live in a climate controlled bubble.

But yes it is nice some reporters at a Connecticut paper have bravely tried living for one day without a personal automobile, just as the majority of earthlings do every single day. But be careful: it’s addictive!

This is really outrageous. DOT hired a corps of pedestrian safety managers in response to one politically motivated Daily News editorial about “pedestrian perdition” on the Manhattan Bridge, even though there had been no deaths, just the random complaint of an editor who got yelled at by a cyclist one day.

But a little girl died crossing the street and there’s no response to Silver and no pedestrian safety managers deployed to keep people alive? How tone deaf can the DOT be?

If the DOT wants to disprove the meme that it does not listen to the community, this is not helping.

Hiring those $80k / month “pedestrian safety managers” to loaf around on cycling paths that demonstrated no safety problem was a low point for the DOT, if not the human race generally.

The brutal fact of the matter is that we have power a differential on the road. This involves some road users (basically the motorised ones) having massive potential lethality and some others (generally speaking, those walking and cycling) having a lot less. This is apart from the fact that the latter – referred to as “Vulnerable Road Users” because, like the vast majority of travellers in the world, they happen to be outside cars – are particularly vulnerable to the danger posed by the former.

The BC Chief Executive is also correct to echo the idea of Safety in Numbers put forward by the CTC “…evidence suggests that the more people who cycle, the safer it becomes.”. This is a notion based on the adaptive behaviour of road users to perceived hazards, explored by the road safety academic Reuben Smeed decades ago, elaborated here , and here and studiously ignored by the road safety establishment ever since.

Safety in numbers does not lend itself to the sale of any particular safety product, except of course the upright bicycle.