"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote in message
...

[snip]


...... There are
two main reasons why cyclists go through red lights: first, because
they can get away with it, and second, because the energy required
to
restart after coming to a halt is equivalent to extending your
journey
by up to 200 metres.

There's a third reason, too, although thankfully it's not as common
in London as it is in some places.

There are traffic engineers who don't consider vehicles without
motors to be proper vehicles, so they simply set the traffic light
vehicle detectors so they don't detect cyclists. This trains
cyclists to believe that there is no point in waiting at lights,
because lights don't turn green for cyclists. Furthermore it sends
out the message that the professionals who cause the inevitably
resulting red light running don't consider that red light running to
be a problem.

I gather that bad detectors are sometimes a problem even for
motorcycles.

Jeremy Parker