Re: Bourke Street Bicycle Road

In aus.bicycle on Tue, 13 May 2008 01:23:29 -0700 (PDT)
tenspeed <tenspeed@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Looks as if a "focus group" of "potential cyclists" was shown pics of
> various sorts of bike lanes and thought the two-way ones looked nice:

Hmm.. couple that with this re****t about gut feel safety *****sment
often being wrong...

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/think-before-you-leap/2008/05/11/1210444242976.html

" "People are not accustomed to thinking hard," writes Daniel
Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, "and are often content
to trust a plausible judgement that quickly comes to mind"."

""Psychology and media aside, a third element skewing our perceptions
of risk is marketing. Simply put, fear is useful. Fear sells products.
Fear wins votes. Fear attracts public attention. "

People with little or no experience of cycling in traffic fear
traffic.  And so see something that "looks right" and think it is
right.  THinking hard about it, using intelligence and looking for
problems is too hard (and probably not worth the effort for a bit of
focus group silliness).

Zebee