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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

People bike for exercise. Then they do everything they possibly can to avoid slowing down and speeding up again, which takes more work.

Well, many people (myself included) bike to commute and are not particularly interested in it taking more effort than strictly necessary.

Although I'll grant you that Robin is possibly not commuting right there, with it being circle path and all.

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In London, it has always been my experience that there is no consensus about which side of the sidewalk to walk on. People seemed to me to randomly choose a side, which led to near-collisions all the time.

This is probably due to the fact that some half of people there are immigrants conditioned to walk on right side of the sidewalk, whereas the British instinct tells the other half to use the wrong^Wleft side, so both sides got their autopilots confused. I've observed similar behaviour when I lived in Ireland some time ago.

Tangentially, this also reminds me of a factory I'd worked in; most workers where right-side immigrants, so right-side traffic naturally formed on factory floor, but on the doors there were 'this way' and 'no entry' signs placed in the left-side manner.

People would, apparently without much thought, switch sides when approaching the door. With hundreds of people going in both directions on shift changes, I'd been always surprised that there hadn't been any accident there.

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