Again, today, I had the fortune of meeting one of our good motorists in London who appear to have been taking the angry pills.
Minding my own business, cycling along broad lane (a 3/4 lane arm of the wonderful Tottenham Hale gyratory) and I obviously upset an important motorist.
He came up behind the cycle, hanging off the rear wheel and beeping his horn. The traffic was light and he could have simply moved to the next lane to overtake. He clearly decided that he had to harass a cyclist instead.
Eventually he passed whilst shouting at me.
My camera was working at the time, so I have the incident recorded, and have reported it to Roadsafe. I doubt this will be effective at all, presumably the worst that will happen is he gets a letter.
Why people do this is a mystery. I had no altercation with him beforehand, he had a clear 3 other lanes to use, the traffic was light and I was in no way holding him up. I assume it is the misplaced entitlement that some motorists have. I say misplaced, but when the whole road system, and nightmares like the A10 at Tottenham Hale in particular, are designed to cater to the motorist with little or no sanction for speeding and anti-social behaviour, some idiots are always going to take advantage.
If TfL and local councils like cycle-hating Newham insist on multi-lane urban motorways in our city then I think the least that should be provided are average speed cameras to at least try to keep traffic within the limits, and a robust attitude to the type of deeply anti-social behaviour exhibited by this driver. Later on I went down the A11 and the speeds attained by motorists on this road must near 50mph in some cases. Enforcement is an utter joke.
I think the heat is getting to there heads. The other day I had a driver come out of a road that I was about to turn right into without looking, blocking a whole lane of traffic coming the other direction. He could easily have caused an accident with the manoeuvre. He then started to shout at me to go on despite the fact I was coming up a steep hill and he had time to pull out in front of me anyway. He waited until I was right in front of him to pull out right up close to me in a very threatening manner.
ReplyDeleteNutter is the only word for the guy,