I’m with you on owning the lane. When I ride through the downtown area of my home, I get in the center of three one-way lanes and sit tall in the saddle, any car that come alongside in the outside lanes gets the stare-down until they acknowledge my presence. The road is a slight downhill, so keeping up with the flow is no prob and I’m faster than the cars when getting out of the blocks after a stop at a light. I do the same thing on shoulder-less hunks of road like bridges. Own the lane.

I’d really love to see gas hit $5/L ($20/gal) and see how smug the drivers are then…

And I did have the XT in my panier - but it survived unscathed

When I rode in traffic it was pretty much with a full expectation that every driver does not see me, ever car in my lane would turn sharply right in front of me. I gace up the road bike after a week where two incident of cars doing that, one a pullout where I took a fly across the hood of the car (w/o the bike), and decided to go to a mountain bike on trails and paths out o traffic, That’s probably not an option everywhere.

Your approach is sane to definitely be seen. I totally agree that there is an abundance of bad driver, distracted driver, stupid I Bought My License at Walmart driver, but I always acknowledged from my own driving experience that it can be hard to see all bicyclists as their visibility profile can be really low in certain place. I had one pitch on my old ride that wa a bridge over a freeway exit, and I always cursed the drivers puling out for right turn on red across my path — and then I drove it and saw how little visibility drivers had as in the mornings it wa direct into sunlight and the guard rail really obscured all viewage to the drivers left– so I changed my approach to that intersection to expect them not to see me,

I totally agree about the pathetic case that no one in a car stops to help. I had one time where I came around a corner too fast and the road was wet from a sprinkler, and my rear wheel slipped out from under me, and I went down with some skids. I lay there stunned about a minute or two (there was no damage(, but totally remember cars going past me on the ground, can even see their faces as they look, slow down, but dont stop.

Hope you did not have the Big Camera when you went down