Taking the Lane - a theory

If you as a cyclist find yourself on a multi-lane road with no suitable shoulder or bike path to ride in, good sense and self-preservation demand that you "take the lane," which is basically to own the rightmost lane and ride in the center of it. The law backs this up, in fact. While it is tempting to ride as far to the side as you can, this risks getting doored, and more importantly, encourages slack-jawed fools to try to wedge by you in the same lane. And you don't really trust your life to the spatial judgment of slack-jawed fools, do you?

In the downtown area, essentially all of the streets without bike lanes are one-way, three lanes, 25mph posted limit. Assuming drivers keep it under thirty, the speed differential between a motorist and a cyclist (the kind with the confidence to ride in traffic) shouldn't really be all that great. If you're in a hurry, change into one of the other two lanes and go around. If there's so much traffic that it's actually a pain to change lanes, the cyclist is probably going to outpace the traffic anyhow.

So easy in practice, yet so seldom done. Why? Because driving, at least in a non grand-prix sense, is a lazy activity which seldom requires any exertion on the part of the operator. Looking left and rotating the wheel that you're already holding slightly is cake. There's no way that if you sat a test subject in a laboratory chair, put a wheel in front of them, and asked them to perform this task, they'd ever in a million years rate it as difficult. But when a person possesses some sense of entitlement that says they shouldn't be required to work at all aside from sitting in a padded chair and moving a foot once in a while, turning your head to check and see where the next gap in traffic is becomes this huge thing. It's like settling in to watch a movie and then being asked to actually get up and walk to the television to adjust the volume. Walking 8 feet is no big thing, but now you're all grumpy. Look how many people can't be bothered to use turn signals. You know I'm right.