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.