J's Wednesday photos

Something a bit different - J was driving around the Bay this morning (a few hours after I rode around it) and she spotted something in the water. A big something. My habit of taking photos of everything has obviously rubbed off on her. Well spotted!

And it's not the cormorant in the background that's popped up for a look. I haven't bothered googling any news sites to see what this is all about. The car isn't that far from the water's edge. Someone going to fast perhaps?

Getting angry with doors

Came within a whisker of being wiped out by a car door last week. Although the bloke had opened it a bit as I approached (and after reviewing the video, I thought I would have spotted that), he chucked it open just as I went level with his car. I had no time to react - brake or swerve. Either I was going to hit the door, or I wasn't.

I chucked a U-turn straight away and went back and had words with the driver. He claimed he'd looked "a second before", but that was complete rubbish. I think he cracked his door open, searched around for and then lit up a smoke, and then pushed the door open once it was alight. He didn't look.

I wasn't very happy with him. I called him a few rude names. Smashing into his door at 40km/h would not have been pleasant.

After the adrenaline wore off, I felt sick to the stomach - the shock kicking in I guess. It took a while before that feeling passed.

Smokers - a new reason to hate them

Disclaimer - I used to be a smoker. Gave up over 20 years ago. Well, apart from the odd ciggie when I'd get on the turps - but eventually, I even gave up that nasty little habit.

Was riding home last week. A ute went past (two tradesmen inside) and the first thing I noticed was that it reeked of dope. There's enough idiots on the road without stoned idiots being added into the mix.

The ute had a small case of the wobbles - the driver was having a hard time keeping a straight line. It had to slow down, and I went past.

Next time it passed me, the passenger flicked his butt in my general direction. Nearly hit me in the face. I don't think it was deliberate - I think he was too bombed to realise what he was doing.

Fuckers.

They're not as bad as the parrots though. My trip to work takes me under a stretch of wattle trees, and the parrots are going nuts in them at the moment. Twice last week a bit of wattle was dropped by a feeding parrot, with the wattle slamming into my cheek just below my eye. Good thing I always, always wear protective glasses. Those bloody parrots - I swear they're out to get me.

Tuesday photos

Sunrise this morning - beautiful time of the day to be up and about.

Seems it's not only cyclists that are carrying video cameras around with them to record idiot drivers - this motorcyclist appears to have one mounted on the side of his helmet.

Speaking of idiot drivers - see the black car up the road on the wrong side of the double white line? She shot straight up the road past all the cars (and me) waiting at the red light. I thought she was going to turn right into one of the buildings along the way, but she blithely drove all the way up to the intersection and was ready to continue through the light - until a bigger vehicle (the white van) came around the corner and just about smacked into her! After a bit of tooting, she sheepishly reversed back and ducked back across the double white line onto the correct side of the road.

At that point, I rode up through the traffic to have a look - just to confirm my prejudices. Yes, young female driver, doing her best to pretend it never happened. The video camera batteries were flat, so all I have is the photo of her being a right twat. Or should that be "moose claw"?

At last - a bicycle.

Monday photos

Tradesman in a ute getting a ticket from a cop - there is justice in this world. Tradesmen in utes, along with men in white vans, are a cyclists worst enemies. I just wish the cop had said, "Sir, are you in a hurry?" If he responded in the affirmative, she should have shot all his tyres out and finished with, "Not any more".

This bloke was thin and keen. Not often that a bloke on a bike with fat tyres goes over the bridge as fast as this fellow - he just stood up at the start and pumped the whole way over.

A one man road rocket. I snapped a photo of this bloke as he went past, and then he was gone. Whoosh. Then again, he's about half as wide as me - less wind resistance.

A couple of vids

Blogger's video processing engine stalled on me a few days ago - it simply refused to process the video in this post - I think it has finally emerged and is ready for viewing.

Here's the first in a series of short-short vids. This first is called "death by taxi". I wrote about it a few days ago. I was annoyed at being held up by the slow moving taxi in front of me, but I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decided against making any potentially suicidal overtaking moves. A cyclist coming up behind me thought he could safely overtake the taxi on the outside, but he was wrong. I know from experience that when cars go around this corner, they always go wide to the right. That's what this taxi did, and the cyclist almost got squished between it and a low concrete divider.

The second one shows a mum carrying a kid stepping out in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction. You can't see her head in the video - and I couldn't see it in real life either. Her kids head was blocking her view in this direction. Instead of looking around her kid, she just stepped off the tram platform. I've seen boneheads do this in the past when a tram has been coming along instead of a bike. Luckily for both of us, I saw what she was doing and guessed that she was about to step in front of me, so I stood on the brakes before she actually departed the platform. A more aggressive and less aware cyclist would have cleaned her up - along with the kid. Headlines would then blare "mother and child run down by insane cyclist", rather than "idiot steps in front of cyclist without bothering to look".

It's a conspiracy, I tell you

Men in utes are out to get me. Particularly those displaying P plates. Almost got taken out by two today.

Then again, young idiot males are liable to crash into just about anyone or anything, so maybe they aren't out to get me.

Note - almost every ute that I have had a close call with has been a Holden. Just the one Ford. Fords are obviously driven by boring old people who can't find second gear.

Wednesday photos

The unseasonal cool spell has been great for riding - not too hot, not too cold. It was about 20 degrees when I rode to work, and 24 when I came home. Given that the silly season is still in operation, I slept in this morning and didn't get going until about 8am. There were a lot of other cyclists out and about - either that it the time when they normally ride to work (making me a very early starter), or lots of people have decided that the combination of the sleepy holiday period and the nice weather makes for a good time to ride to work.

One reason I gave up the backpack - the larger models never sit in the middle of your back when you are hunched over. They always fall over to one side or the other - very uncomfortable. There are two bikes way off in the distance in this photo - no matter where I rode this morning, there were a couple of other bikes in sight.

This was not a good place to take one hand off the brakes to take a photo - I need all the braking power I can get on steep descents like this one, and when the bloke in front started to brake hard, I was in a spot of bother. This should be the only photo you'll ever see of this location.

Although it's supposed to be the season of good cheer etc, two idiots did their best to run me off the road today. Both were in a screaming hurry to be somewhere else. I'm seasoned enough to recognise when a driver is in a manic rush, and I do my best to get the hell out of their way, contenting myself with giving them the finger once they have gone past. I also had to yell at a pedestrian who ambled out into the bike lane right in front of me without looking - she was fiddling with her iPod of course. Gave her a nasty fright, and I didn't even have to swear. Hopefully, she will have enough sense not to do that again.

Who gave this bonehead a car?

Yesterday must have been the annual "Death on the road day", but I guess I missed the announcements for it. Check out this bonehead at the eastern approach to the ANZAC Bridge, turning across several lanes of traffic after he realises "Oops, I don't want to go to the land of bogans".



It's not clear in this video, but you should have seen the shocked look on his face when he realised I was filming him - that's when J and I start laughing.

You, sunshine, are an utter bonehead.

I say that it must have been the annual "Death on the roads day" as I went for a ride in the afternoon and was nearly cleaned up at two separate roundabouts. The worst time to go for a ride is around the time when school finishes for the day - by far, the worst drivers on the roads are distracted parents picking up their kids. I have been guilty of leaning back and searching around on the floor for a dropped Buzz Lightyear, but only at red lights and things like that. Many parents seem to think that it's fine to turn around and feed their offspring as they hurtle down a packed freeway at 100km/h.

Anyway, I was not on a packed freeway. I was cruising the backstreets of bogan land, checking out real estate. Mainly real estate that I can't afford to buy, but a bike is a great way to look at houses. You can pull over really quickly, park anywhere, travel quickly enough to see a lot of them in a short time, yet slowly enough to have a good look at what you are passing without holding up the traffic behind you.

Both miscreants were driving small, 3 door hatchbacks. The first was a woman who was deep in conversation with her friend in the passenger seat. I saw her coming down the road towards me (I was turning right through the roundabout) and at no point did her eyes flick left or right to look for traffic coming from anywhere in the known universe - she just zoomed through the roundabout like she was wrapped in some sort of God-like protective bubble. I thought about chasing her and yelling in her ear, but got over it.

I minute later, a Boxster went past a mite too close, and I did chase him and caught him a few hundred yards up the road. I was about to bollock him very loudly from six inches away, when I noticed that he had one of those WWI waxed fighter pilot moustaches (he was about 50 I'd say), and I was so impressed, I just said, "You got a bit close back there", which I had to repeat once, but I think he got the message.

About 5 minutes after that, another little sub-$12,000 piece of Korean shit just about took me out at another roundabout - and even though I had the right of way, the guy beeped at me! He beeped at me!

He must have seen the look on my face, which was KILL KILL KILL, for he pulled alongside, wound down the passenger window and apologised profusely for beeping, and even more so for trying to kill me. That calmed me down in an instant - so much so, that I said sorry as well and wondered for a moment if he in fact had the right of way. No, I had the right of way, and was well in front of him in the roundabout - so much so that if he hadn't stopped, he would have hit me from behind. He had simply approached the roundabout too fast and with no intention of looking to his right for entering traffic.

I notice that the abuse that 4WD's used to cop in the media has subsided. Good. 98% of the grief that I cop as a cyclist comes from the following vehicles:

• small hatchbacks
• tradesmen in utes
• vans, especially couriers
• taxis
• any form of fuckwit in something like a WRX

Yesterday, I could have added a 2.5 tonne truck as well. The idiot tradesman driving it overtook me with about 2 inches to spare. The traffic built up, I overtook him, then a few minutes later, he did it again. He did it four times in the end - I was getting ready to reach into his tray and throw his toolbox onto the road when he turned right and got out of my life. (Before throwing his toolbox out, I had a good look at him and found that he was really fat, so if he tried to chase me on foot, he would have no chance).

I think the trick to throwing a toolbox onto the road from a truck is to make sure they are really stuck in stalled traffic, find an escape route and then do it. Never do it where they have a chance to catch you.

Anyway, from now on, I am going to avoid the 2.30pm to 4.00pm timeslot like the plague.

And in case you are wondering, most of my riding yesterday was on roads with marked and separate bike lanes, so it's not like I was getting in the way of any cars.

Very annoying driving habits

This is the corner of Great North Road and Lyons Road. I took this photo from Lyons Road.



This intersection is a source of much frustration for me. As you can see, at this point, Lyons Road is a two lane road. As soon as it gets across the intersection, it merges into one lane. But note that you can't turn right at this intersection, and there is a slip road a bit further back to allow traffic to easily turn left into Great North Road.

The thing that utterly, utterly shits me is that polite people will queue up in the right hand lane, since that one goes straight ahead, and the traffic flows really well if you have a simple line of traffic taking off when the light goes green.

But then you get the odd impatient fucker, like the two ahead of me, that slip into the left hand lane and try to jump ahead of those in the right lane. They drive me spare. It's one of those times that I want a remote weapons station on the roof with say a .50 cal.

Stupid woman driver

Sorry, but I have to say sorry here. I don't wish to stigmatise female drivers, but boy, I "engaged" with one of the stupid ones tonight.

I was belting home through Drummoyne along a section of road that has a couple of roundabouts close together. The thing about being on a bike is that you can flog through roundabouts at top speed because you don't have to slow down to go around them - you can go straight through them.

I normally go through them so quickly that any cars behind me don't have a chance to catch me and overtake me in between the roundabouts, so I just sit out in the middle of the lane in order to block the odd jackass from trying to overtake me in the roundabout (which a few have tried to do). I don't like hogging the entire lane, but it's what I have to do to stop myself from being squashed in a roundabout.

I thought I'd seen it all, until I met this woman. She didn't just overtake me - she went around the roundabout on the wrong side of the road! And then she drove up the road a good distance, still on the wrong side!

Unbe-fucking-leivable. Especially since the roundabout had pretty bad sight-lines on the right hand side, so she could have gone head on into someone coming the other way. I was just gobsmacked - so stunned, I didn't even think to pull out the camera and grab a snap. I have been thinking of getting a helmet mounted camera for a few months - this might be just the impetus that I need to buy one.

It was a day of meeting silly fuckers like that. I had just left the office when a silly fucker in a van (probably a plumber) overtook me without bothering to change lanes. The side of his van was so close, I could have tapped it with my elbow. I certainly tapped his door at the next set of lights and told him what I thought of his driving. Of course he was writing a text message when I caught up with him - and I reckon he had been doing that when he missed me by 6 inches. All he could do in response was make a moronic sound, which I guess was his sorry excuse for an explanation. I think the noise was meant to say, "If you are stupid enough to ride a bike, then you just have to put up with ignorant fuckheads like me."

Where did I put that Glock again?

Scrotums

I am not racist, sexist or ageist. Fuckwits come in all colours, ages and sexes. All sorts of people are equally worthless (to paraphrase a line from Full Metal Jacket).

Picture this. It's been raining here for days. The roads are wet and slippery. I'm tooling up Pitt St (literally, as it is uphill) towards a red light, taking it easy because I figure there is no need to waste energy tromping it up to a light and then sitting there.

This tool in a black RAV4 type thing goes around me by crossing the double white line and flooring it up a narrow street intersected by many underground carparks that from experience, disgorge cars with wild abandon. The corner we are heading towards is a blind one, as in cars turn left into Pitt St without being able to see what is around the corner.

I got rather upset with the driver, since if a car did come around the corner, three things could have happened.

1. Cars collide head on, with no impact on me
2. Car overtaking me takes evasive action by going hard left, taking me out
3. Car coming the other way takes evasive action, coming into my lane and taking me out
   

I was less than happy with Mr RAV4 cockhead, and told him so at the next lights. He wound down his window a crack to get an earfull, and I noticed his wife making a dismissive sign at me from the passenger seat. Both of them were mid-60's I'd say.

His response was, "We do what we like".

Love that - the Royal "we".

Well, we fucking don't do what we like. We obey the rules of the road, and the principles of common sense, patience and courtesy. Especially in the rain.

Fuck, I've said it before. Got to get myself a Glock.

Funny thing is, after doing his little racing/overtaking manouvere, I ended up beside him at the next three sets of lights, which all went red as we approached. He could take off faster than me, but it made no difference in the CBD. The little turd and his regal wife didn't even have the self awareness to be embarassed.

Stupid old pricks.

Stupid bastards

I had the sorry mispleasure this week to be within 50 metres of two fuckwits of the type that you just hope don't enter your life too often, or for too long.

The first was a raving twat on a bike that I saw on the way home tonight. He was weaving through the traffic in a very uncontrolled fashion, sans helmet, and then ran a red light right in front of me.... as he was talking on his mobile. I guess that explained the studied lack of control of the bike.

I really felt like yelling at him...something along the lines of, "You fucking idiot! You're giving us a bad name. Pull your fucking head in and grow a brain."

With luck, said brain is now leaking into a gutter somewhere. That type of numbskull really gripes me, because it helps to produce fuckwits of this type....

There I am, cruising down Lilyfield Rd on the way to work. It's about 6.45am, and it's a lovely morning. A much leaner, fitter and browner bloke zips past me, and I idly think about jamming down on the pedals and trying to get on his tail. Nah, it's too hot, so I'll just let him go.

He opens up a bit of a lead on me - maybe 15 metres, and the lights go orange just as he crosses the threshold of the intersection. I am close enough and going fast enough to get through on the orange if I really gun it, but I take the sane option and brake.

Thank goodness. Before the lights our way go red, a small hatchback blasts across the intersection from the left, barely missing the rear wheel of the bike in front. If I had chased him, it would have been curtains for me.

This is how red the light going the other way was. A few seconds later, a WRX coming from the left stops at the same light. The driver looks at me with a look of horror on her face - she has realised what almost happened, even if the fucking dickbrain in the other car didn't. We looked at each other for several seconds, then the light went green for her, and off she went.

In other words, the idiot had not just run through on a late orange - he had run a light that had been red for a good 30 seconds.

Afterwards, a few possibilities went through my mind. The first thought was that dickhead was half asleep and zoned out and just failed to see the lights at all.

Then I remembered the way the WRX had pulled up. And the look on her face.

Had they been racing?

I'll never know.

I do my utmost to stay upright on the road. I wear bright colours - colours so bright that I used to get teased mercilessly in my old workplace about their obscene brightness. I always wear a helmet. I have really bright lights back and front, and use them whenever it gets even a little bit dark. I am ultra careful about my riding position on the road. I never stick headphones in my ears. I keep my ears and eyes open. I avoid routes that I think are risky. I don't go blatting through red lights, stop signs, give way signs and all the rest. I wait my turn when sitting in traffic. in short, I am the old woman of cycling.

It's sobering that even the safest of strategies can come horribly unglued by just one nutjob behind the wheel.

Idiots

Two Sydney teenagers had their cars seized after they were allegedly caught street racing, and driving at almost 100kmh in a 60kmh zone.

"They have seen two P-platers allegedly street racing in an easterly direction," NSW police said in a statement today.

"One of the men was driving a dark-coloured Mitsubishi Lancer ... while the other was driving a Hyundai Elantra.

How do you get an Elantra up to 100kmh? Install a JATO rocket in the boot?

This section of road must be downhill with a persistent tailwind.

Meat heads

Fuck me, this has been a bad week for riding as far as close calls go. Every day has been a litany of idiot drivers opening doors without looking, cars deciding to pull out from a side street without giving way, wingnuts going around me without giving me much room and other cyclists trying to kill me in head on collisions.

I had a non-close encounter tonight with a bus full of meat heads. It was a Coaster bus that was on hire, and I suspect the inhabitants were on their way to the Casino. As they went past me as I rode around the back of Darling Harbour, one friendly character stuck his head out the window and told me to "Get off the fucking road", which was choice, given that I was riding in the bike lane and was not really "on the road". I certainly wasn't in the way of his busfull of drunks.

I caught up with the bus at the next set of lights and thought better of grabbing the bloke by the elbow (sticking out of the window) and giving it a good yank. He was gripping a packet of Winfields in one hand a VB stubbie in the other, and all his mates had mullets and stubbies and appeared to be dressed only in blue singlets. They all sounded drunk as skunks. They smelled like Labor voters.

Why did they smell like Labor voters?

Well I bet that they sure as fuck didn't vote for Howard at the last election, and they didn't strike me as the kind of wishy-washy fairyheads that vote Green. No, these were dyed in the wool, dinky-di, heartland blue collar Labor voters. And they hated cyclists.

Poor old Labor must be in a bit of an internal lather. Out west, you've got your blue collar bogans that want nothing less than a V8 ute to tow a ski boat with a V8 motor back to their 9 bedroom McMansion with a 50 inch plasma in every room. They are the kind of people that think that the SuperNats is great culture (as do I) and that polar bears make great throw rugs in the media room. They are about as committed to consuming less as an alcoholic is to drinking less.

Face it, if you are one generation away from poverty, why are you going to give up all the good things in life like air conditioning, overseas travel, V8's, plasma TV's and so on just because a bunch of sandal wearing wierd beards tell you to? It's all very well for someone that was born with a silver spoon up their arse to say "I will forgo these things" because they had them from the day they first broke wind. But it's not so easy for say a plumber that grew up one pay packet away from the poverty line and has finally made good. They'll be giving the whole global warming malarky two fingers and I say good luck to them.

I reckon the attitude to bikes says it all. Why would anyone ride a bike when they could afford to drive a ute with a six litre donk under the hood? You'd have to be mad, gay or feral (to their way of thinking), and therefor deserve to be run over by a bus.

I'm not sure how the lefties that invaded the party since the 1970's are going to be reconciled to the bogans out in the heartland.

I'll just stay out of the way of buses in future.

I hate tailgaters

I hate pricks that get so close to your tailend that their number plates disappear from view. By the time I pulled the camera out and snapped this photo, the driver had actually pulled back somewhat, but cameras make idiots seem to be further away than they actually are.



There we are, out in the country with the cruise control set on 100, and dingbat decides to attempt to connect their roo bar to my tow ball. The road is flat and straight and devoid of double white lines (see earlier post featuring GPS shot of the road in question) and the only things in view out the front are squashed foxes, dead roos and the odd galah eating spilled grain on the side of the road.

Mr Retard decides that instead of overtaking, he'll sit on my arse for 10 km or so. I reckoned that if I put my foot down and tried to loose him, he'd just speed up and get even closer, so I shook him off by disengaging the cruise control and slowing down.....and down.....and down until the fucking clownfish finally got the message and overtook me when I was doing about 70.

Turned out that the fuckwad was fiddling with his mobile phone - possibly trying to send a text - in an area where my phone gets no signal, even with a car kit. Just what I needed - a tailgating texter.

Morons like this seemed to abound over the Christmas break. Some appear to get right up your arse with the aim of making you go faster. Now if I was driving a Mini and a cement truck was tailgating me, I'd be speeding up. But I'm driving a tall, lumpen 4WD, and I don't give a shit if someone in a low slung boy racer with enormous front and rear spoilers and a number plate like XCCENTU8 gets too close to my tail. One nudge of my brakes and the road will be littered with fibreglass that used to be shaped as a spoiler. Hence my refusal to remove my towball, even when not in use.

The best way to lose them is to just slow down. If they want to go fast and wrap themselves around a power pole, you won't find me getting in their way. I'll just slow down to a grannie like pace that will force them to go around. Of course I always do that in the hope that a radar trap is just around the corner.

But screw them. Just because they want to go faster, doesn't mean I have to break the speed limit as well to satisfy their juvenile need to get to the next KFC 30 seconds faster. I wonder if I can still get the car registered if I have a rear facing flame thrower?