Category - Bad Drivers

This one is doing the rounds on the newsfeeds and in the media. I’ve linked to the YouTube version because it isn’t screwed up with stupid 30-second ads which papers like the Mail insist on putting in.

[EDIT: As is typical with the halfwits who are involved with these things, the video is no longer available]

It concerns a cyclist’s video of a road rage incident in Farringdon, London. The Audi driver is obviously a prat, but as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s just evolution at work – it goes for virtually all Audi drivers. However, the cyclist is also clearly seated on that rung on the evolutionary ladder that is typical of his kind.

The Audi shouldn’t have encroached on the forward area to start with. For that, he is at fault. However, the cyclist who opened his big mouth – and who ended up getting punched – was hardly without blame. Let’s face facts: he actually started the road rage incident in the first place because the Audi would just have driven past and that would have been the end of it. By shoving his face into the Audi he initiated the whole affair that developed, and he certainly precipitated the outcome with his subsequent behaviour and language. Indeed, the group he was part of appeared to be deliberately trying to ride in the way of traffic instead of staying to the left, and he was hardly out of the way of following traffic as he veered all over the road in his attempts to catch up with the Audi. This is standard cyclist behaviour, unfortunately: they consider themselves more important than motor vehicles.

As I say, the Audi was wrong. The Audi passenger/driver who punched the cyclist was wrong. But the cyclist was in the wrong, too.

Drivers are required to stop at the first line of the cycle forward area. A large number don’t – just as an equally large number encroach on single stop lines at traffic lights when there’s no camera (taxis are by far the worst culprits there). Encroaching on the forward area unnecessarily is bad driving.

But, then again, cyclists are also bound by rules which they ignore. Many just ride through traffic lights whatever colour they’re on. They’re hardly the angels they’d have you believe that they are.

However, this article in The Independent makes interesting reading. It seems that more and more motorists are fitting dash-cams. The article gives an interesting comment:

Jeremy Clarkson got a flavour of what will happen when he tweeted a picture earlier this month of a cyclist “taking the lane” as he drove behind him in Chelsea in his Range Rover. Clarkson said the cyclist “hurled abuse at anyone who overtook”. He later wrote that he received “a cacophony of abuse from people saying that I was somehow to blame, that they had reported me to the police for taking the picture and that I was basically a bastard for driving a car, on a road”.

This is exactly the point I have been making about cyclists for a long time now.

I’m not sure if this is legal – but even if it is, it’s totally wrong from a moral standpoint. It’s a story in The Independent about how “cycling activists” are attempting to sway the results of local council elections by offering their votes to “bike-friendly candidates”.

Various activist groups are involved. To quote one:

Chris Peck, campaigns co-ordinator at national cycling charity CTC, said the elections were a “major opportunity to ensure that cycling is still seen as a high priority”. “Councils have huge budgets and huge power,” he said. “They are places where we need to spend a lot more effort on converting people to support cycling.”

Note how this comedian misses the point completely – as do all these radical cycling numpties. His aim is to get cyclists on roads whether it’s safe or not – and he’ll sell his vote to get his way.

The article also mentions a Birmingham cell who are calling for changes on a major link road on the strength of a single fatality of a 13-year old over two years ago, even though the driver of the lorry was jailed for dangerous driving. Again, they miss the point entirely – if the driver was at fault, what is wrong with the road? What is there that specifically needs to be changed that would have prevented the incident?

The problem is that if you asked any Spandex-wearing activist, they would have every single road in the country changed. None of them can understand that roads are dangerous by virtue of the fact that big, heavy machinery travels on them. There are those whose political maturity is still in the womb on this topic, and who seriously see banning those nasty machines from roads as a genuine solution. They forget that there are already “roads” where traffic is banned. Those roads are called “cycle paths”, and many of these Spandex-wearing politicos refuse point blank to go anywhere near them.

Those last two articles I wrote concerning cyclists have generated a lot of blog traffic via Twitter and Facebook. As I’ve pointed out before, I don’t allow comments on this blog because they’re just an excuse for juvenile prats to swear and post links to pornography sites. And the contact form makes it clear that any abuse through that will immediately be reported to the sender’s ISP (and you CAN be traced, so don’t kid yourself that you can’t), and I guess that’s why hits to that page also skyrocketed, but only produced one actual submission.

The reader who responded refers to the “idiotic” cyclist shown in the photograph in the post about HGV drivers being forced to take mandatory cycling lessons in Islington. He asks where I think he should ride instead (I’ve included the picture again). Well, the answer is simple: anywhere else – just not there!

Cyclists seem unable to comprehend anything that doesn’t go 100% in their favour. In this case, it just amazes me that they cannot understand that although the cyclist in the picture may well have every right to do what he’s doing, he would have to be a complete and utter pillock to actually do it.

It’s like sticking your hand in a blender or an open fire – yes, you have every right to do it if you choose to do so, but if you get injured (and even if you don’t) you’re going to have to accept that you’re still a prat.

Irrespective of who would be to blame, if one of those lorries swerved – to avoid another cyclist, for example – the cyclist would be dead. And no doubt the Spandex-clad fingers would then start pointing at the HGVs again.

The simple fact is that the degree of danger for a cyclist varies from nothing to almost total, depending on where (and how) he rides. Riding between lorries, or in among large numbers of lorries, is right up at the bad end.

Nothing can alter that, including the ridiculous idea from the Greenies that lorries should be constructed out of glass to give 360° vision in all three dimensions (or possibly all four dimensions if it’s an activist-led idea). Even if that ever happened – and it won’t – it would take decades to implement.

It’s also worth me repeating what I said to that reader in response to various other accusations:

• I ride a bike
• I use cycle paths
• I avoid riding among traffic, especially on purpose
• I teach pupils to be careful around cyclists
• I teach pupils what cyclists behave like
• My pupils see frequent examples of what cyclists behave like

So there is no point whatsoever trying to pretend that all cyclists are angels. They aren’t.

Shortly after I published this I received another email from a reader. Here it is in full (with his permission):

Cyclists

I have to say, I really enjoy reading your views on cyclists as they are more or less exactly the same as mine.

Where I live and teach Corby and Kettering) there is an elderly guy, who I’m told by one of my pupils used to be her geography teacher. He ‘rides’ one of those contraptions where the user is pretty much lying down, and will do so regardless of the queues of traffic building up behind him. We currently have a lot of major road works in the area, notably the A6003 between Corby and Kettering, where there are lane closures and contra flow systems in place. It’s a fairly common sight to see a queue a couple of miles long behind this idiot as he will exercise his right to ride it anywhere he wants regardless of how much chaos he creates. He’s retired, and as such I can only assume he does it for the exercise and enjoyment, I’m just not sure if the thing he’s riding is even road legs, much less how he’s not dead yet, being no more than 18 inches off the ground.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest!

I’ve mentioned these lying-down bikes before – their proper name is “recumbent bike”. Around my way you usually see them on a Sunday on narrow country lanes, surrounded by a group of middle-aged men riding two or three abreast and travelling at low speed. The rider of the recumbent usually has a beard and legs that look like something out of a toothpaste tube. All of them are trying to act as if they were 20 years younger.

The cycling militia can rant on all they like about driving instructors feeling this way, but we are just talking sense.The simple fact is that eventually someone in authority is going to see have to see sense too and stop keep trying to pander to the Spandex Corps all the time.

Roads are for motor vehicles, and cycle paths are for bicycles. And as the number of people having absolutely no road sense but being encouraged to start riding a bike increases, the Law needs to start forcing cyclists to stay off roads and keep to cycle paths.