More gumbies

As much as I love the bike lane that runs down Lilyfield Rd, I detest some of the bus drivers that I have to share the road with. Some are considerate, and others are just arseholes in a hurry. The legal speed limit along here is 50km/h. I can do that by just rolling and not cranking the pedals, since it is a good fast downhill. Keeping up with the traffic is not an issue - but there are always those that want to go 60 in a 50 zone, and that includes bus drivers. I can do 60 too, but being a reasonably law abiding chap, I tend to obey the speed limits to a certain extent.

Anyway, here is bus driver in a hurry overtaking me.

Up ahead on the left, there is a parked bus. The lanes are not that wide, so the bus on the left is intruding well into the bike lane, and the bus going down hill in front of me is drifting into my lane, making it a tight fit.

It's hard to tell from this screen grab, but when the speedy bus passed the parked bus, the gap was about one foot. I have ridden with some fools that would try to shoot that kind of gap - they are not long for this world if they try that too often. They have some stupid sense of entitlement that says, "This is a bike lane, I should be able to ride in it unmolested". Nice in theory, deadly in practice.

Because as soon as speedy bus gets past parked bus, he pulls hard left to stop and collect passengers. If a bike had shot the gap, the cyclist would then have been squashed into the kerb by the second bus. Ouch. But these things happen.

And now we have our morning gumby. From time to time, I stretch the morning ride by going out to Abbotsford and working my way through the back street - essentially I am perving at real estate. Watch the Mercedes gumby and try and work out why she made such a crap job out of reversing out of her driveway and then moving off.

Simple answer. Had a coffee cup in one hand and was trying to steer with the other. Prime candidate for Gumby of the Day.