Had a very close call coming home on Friday afternoon. Here's some pictures that I prepared earlier to try and show what happened.
The green stripe is me on me bike. The purple car coming up behind me is being driven by an impatient woman. The orange car coming towards us is a white ute with three teenagers across the bench seat, all chatting and yahooing as they head home from work.
The impatient cow decides to speed up just as we get to the corner so that she can overtake me. There is a set of lights about 100 metres to our right. They are red. She is speeding so she can get to a red light a few seconds earlier. By turning across my bow, she blocks the ute driver from seeing me. I have to brake to avoid plowing into her rear quarter panel.
Once she gets out of my way, I start to accelarate again. However, the ute driver has decided to turn right - and he hasn't seen me behind the stupid cow.
This is the "oh shit" moment where I am yelling "Stop" at the top of my lungs.
I invoke the Blues Brothers invocation of "Our lady of blessed acceleration don't fail me now." I really hit the gas. I hit the gas so hard, I pull a bunch of muscles in my back and legs from the effort.
It's about now that the ute driver sees me, and shits himself. His window was down, and I could hear him and his two passengers going "Fuck!", and various other words. I am absolutely flooring it, expecting his front bumper to collect my back wheel at any nanosecond. I am braced for impact.
But he doesn't hit me. I keep on going, heart rate "slightly" elevated. The ute keeps on going too - but slowly. The stupid cow is blissfully ignorant of the prang she almost caused. This is why I have no qualms about "taking the lane" when I think the situation warrants it. There are some motorists who overtake in the stupidest circumstances, and if I need to block them in order to save my skin, I'll do it. Fuck 'em. They can curse and scream all they like - I really don't care.
6 comments:
Overtaking and turning is more than just a bike thing BOAB. As you know I travel the Hume Hwy regularly and on nearly every trip I see cars overtaking me and then cutting across my bow to turn into one of the service centres.
We need an onlne system where we can log incidents of stupid and dangerous behaviour by drivers.
It may well be open to abuse, however if we register with our drivers licence or something similar, a driver with consistent complaints from a number of people should be an alert to authorities.
Screw that Cav - I want a .50 cal mounted on a remote station on the roof rack with a joystick in the cab.
I second the .50 cal option.
So many ignorant drivers out there, who forget they're commanding a huge mechanical vehicle that can wreck lives.
Boab, you might be able to find an old one of these parked in a shed somewhere.
In 1956, my army hosts at Singleton let me drive the Staghound for awhile. I was itching to get it onto the New England Highway and sort out a few road hogs.
I was allowed to fire one round (from memory, 50mm).
Great joy when I bulls-eyed a moving target at about 1000 yards.
Wow skeeter,
My dad pulled up in our driveway one afternoon in one of those. He was 're positioning' it from Singleton to Morebank 2BOD
If it makes you feel any better BOAB, I had an enjoyable experience today...
Crossing at a red light, I see this white ute not really slowing down, so I unconsciously start to hit the brakes, slowing down, and low and behold, the stupid prick goes straight through the red light. If I didn't have my instincts, he could well have hit me, tool.
I saw he was a P plater, so either too stupid to notice the light, or in a hurry.
Not particularly happy about that.
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