MH3.0R wrote:But I cannot believe that the push bike riders were still at it across the whole lane and with no lights! Those guys could barely be seen even at 40 kph. They are not doing anything to improve their image with other road users!
This, this and this.
It's so obvious that these cyclists decided they wanted to go for a ride on Australia day, they rock up to their meet up spot which I assume was somewhere around Kinglake as there was like 20 of them just sitting on the round about near the kinglake shops. They look at the weather and almost zero visibility and say, hey we are bike riders we have every right to be on this road regardless of the fact we have no way of being seen until it's too late!
It would be like taking the car out for a drive somewhere at night and all of a sudden all of your exterior light fuses blow, and going....well it's only 20 minutes drive to get back home.....I might as well just drive it even though nobody can see me until it's too late to react.
Normally I'm happy to share the road with cyclists, but today was just dumb. I'm sure some cycling body would be up in arms if any of the riders got killed today, something along the lines of motorists don't respect cyclists rights to use public roads. Bit hard to respect something you can't even see.
I only saw about 3-4 people the entire cruise who actually had front and rear lights on their bikes, out of maybe 60+ cyclists on an overcast day with heavy fog / rain.
Edit: and for clarification we would do like maximum 50km/h in the foggy zones, sometimes getting down to about 30 when it got really heavy. Even so going at such slow speeds it was VERY hard to see cyclists and Mark did a very good job of spotting them early enough. Worst part was some of them riding two abreast with no lights or high visibility gear on the road to get from Kinglake to Hurstbridge (going down the mountain on that super twisty road that is barely able to fit 2 cars as it is on a good day...let alone today)
