Thursday 26 January 2012

Cycle at your own risk

There is a fairly high profile news story at the moment about a cyclist (who is also a lawyer) involved in an incident with a motorist on his daily commute. The motorist was driving aggressively and seemed to consider the cyclist to be basically in his way. A verbal altercation took place which ended with the motorist threatening to kill the cyclist. The cyclist has blogged about the whole thing. The interesting aspect of this is that the whole thing was recorded by the cyclist's helmet cam.

The lack of desire to prosecute and, to be honest, rather pathetic penalty highlights the sad lot that we cyclists have to put up with. I've cycle-commuted my whole life so it comes as no surprise that aggressive, dangerous morons like Scott Lomas are at large on our roads - I experience similar incidents myself quite frequently.

I have long since resigned myself to the fact that cyclists are considered to be the lowest form of life on the roads. We don't count. We're not even human beings; we're cyclists. We are in the way, we should be on the pavement (if you're a motorist), we should be on the road (if you're a pedestrian), we should yield right of way to all other commuters in every circumstance. Of course I exaggerate; 99 out of 100 other road users are perfectly reasonable, courteous and law abiding. Its the 1 out of 100 that you have to watch out for; the Scott Lomas' of this world, and if you cycle just 10 miles in rush hour, you're going to encounter hundreds of motorists and statistically that means at least one moron.

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