There's an intersection that I go through twice a day on my bike where driver behaviour is at its worst. I'm going straight ahead, but most drivers coming towards me are turning right. That means I have right of way. The intersection has lights, which I have not bothered to draw as this taxed my drawing skills to the max. When I go through this intersection in my car, drivers turning right stay behind the line and don't nudge their way out into my travel path.
When I'm on the bike, it's a different story. Buses wait for me. Trucks wait for me. Plenty of car drivers wait for me, but there are also quite a lot that decide that since I look skinny (ha ha), I don't need much road space, so they creep out into the intersection and block half my lane. I have to swerve to the left to get around them. I should point out that due to the physical makeup of this intersection, I can actually get across it faster than most cars from a standing start (there's a big, deep fuck-up front bumper/sump removing gutter that they have to crawl over - but it slows me down not at all). So the cars are not pushing out because I am taking my time getting across the intersection. If there is a car behind me, they'll stay put. They only emerge from their burrow when I'm on my own on my side of the intersection.
Then there are the tradies - the fuckers in utes - who decide that they aren't going to give way to a cyclist, and they plant it when the lights go green and just tear across without any regard for me. I'm pretty good at spotting these clowns whilst I'm sitting at a red light, so I haven't been skittled yet - but the close calls have been legion.
As I said in the heading - no one dares do this to me when I travel the same route in my 4WD. Some drivers clearly do it because they know they can push cyclists around with their cars and generally get away with it. I really don't want to get clobbered by them because I reckon that if I am run down, they'll do a runner.
There's no nice way to put it - they're just cunts.
1 comment:
I don't know if this will work with tradies, but it works with Range Rover drivers who can't be bothered to look where they're going when they turn into you. Scream. Scream as loudly as you can. It has to be a girly scream - falsetto. Make it sound like someone is trying to kill you (they are, after all). It may not stop the tradie, but everyone in the area will turn round and look. Lots of witnesses.
In one of my encounters I saw the female front-seat passenger give the driver a round-house thump with a closed fist.
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