Are you really saying that many cyclists who switch to driving in the winter are characteristically terrible drivers? This is just really at odds with my cycling experience - A biker always needs to be on the defensive just based on the fact that the average driver is likely to not even perceive a smaller vehicle. Even though I haven't seriously biked in several years, I'm still generally aware of what most cars are going to do before they actually do it. (Then again, I guess I've also seen my share of moronic bikers - the kind that think they don't really need to think about what they're doing as long as they're doing it slowly). The first snow is indeed always a mess of bad drivers, but I blame that on people forgetting how slippery snow really is.
It's not so much the snow, it's that the cyclists disappear when it starts getting near freezing, which is the exact time you get a bunch of awful drivers on the road.
I don't mean to say all bikers are bad drivers, I'm just saying the correlation between the two events (the absence of cyclists from the roadways and the new presence of masses of bad drivers) is uncanny.
There's always the bad cyclists that just scare the crap out of you, like the 60-70 year old man who's wobbling about 2 feet from side to side, essentially rendering the bike lane useless. But in my experience as a driver, I've only seen a handful - and by handful I mean one or two - cyclists that actually obey the rules of the road. I see them run red lights and stop signs, I see them go on the side walk to cut past cars to make a right turn. etc
