[br438]

Cycling on the road... ie.. "Sharing the Road" is fraught with issues. One of them being that, when there are dedicated cycling "lanes", most of the time they are never swept and are covered in shards of glass and debris.

so... when getting from point A to point B (why I used to cycle on busy roads), if you ride in that "proper" cycling lane, you stand a decent chance of cutting a tire down and ending up with your head under a tire of a passing car.

that could be 1 of the reasons to ride on the white line... but generally, riding on smooth paint is a bad idea.

Safety in traffic also means (usually) taking enough of the lane that cars have to physically go far around you, and "uneducated-about-cycling" drivers don't subconsciously assume that they can skim by you while still taking the entire lane you are in... which can easily result in you (the cyclist) getting hammered by a mirror at speed... in traffic. ie... if you try to ride far to the right, you may have to swerve deeper into the lane to avoid a metal grate... no matter the direction of grating... they are a bad deal for cyclists. bad-bad.... but a person driving a car trying to skim by you wouldn't know that you need to do that. again. bad-bad.

Why? Point A to Point B. Though as phones became more of a distraction for drivers, my road-cycling days have dwindled. Being in another car among distracted drivers is dangerous enough.