Comment 89968

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted July 05, 2013 at 14:29:53 in reply to Comment 89931

In one way, the very rare encounters with dangerously aggressive drivers are important even if they are not at all representative of the normal cycling experience.

I encounter this sort of driver extremely rarely, less than once a year despite cycling almost daily. However, it only takes a couple of near-death experiences with drivers who clearly don't care whether they injure or kill you to put someone off cycling, perhaps forever.

Ever since my very unpleasant run-in with a driver on Aberdeen who was enraged by the fact that I wanted to turn left from the left lane on Aberdeen http://raisethehammer.org/blog/2597/watc... I have avoided that stretch of Aberdeen.

Incidentally, this driver had the same attitude as Timson, except he actually is on a crusade to force cyclists off the roads and onto the sidewalks by intimidating any cyclist who has the nerve to ride on the road. In other words, he wants to force law-abiding cyclists to break the law! (This is another example of how cyclists just can't win.)

I think what Timson doesn't get is that an aggressive and dangerous driver runs a good chance of killing or injuring their victim, and if that victim is a vulnerable road user such as a pedestrian or cyclist the chance of death or serious injury is very high even if the motorists is only trying to "intimidate" the other road user. Tail gating or passing extremely closely on a city street will at worst lead to a fender bender if a motorist does it to another motorist, but has a good chance of killing the victim if he does it to a pedestrian or cyclist. For example, I don't think many motorists realize that squeezing past a cyclist to avoid changing lanes poses an extreme risk to the cyclist: if they have to swerve quickly to avoid a car in the next lane, the cyclist is dead.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2013-07-05 14:37:38

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