Near misses with vehicles.

[lauaxeta]

Today, while negotiating a roundabout at about 15mph, I was nearly hit by a bozo speeding down the road on my left. I braked, he braked, and I came to a stop directly in front of him. Looking into the windshield, I pointed to my sunglasses, and said 'open your f*****g eyes!!'..(apologies to anyone who takes offence at the use of the industrial language). Neanderthal and passengers just looked at me like dogs who had just been shown a card trick...mouths agape....I pedalled off...

Anyone care to share their own experiences, and what they have done/would do in this situation???

 

[mr. tibbs]

Exact same situation here, except it was a motorist who was entering the roundabout opposite me. There were a couple of cars in front of him and I was only going about 10 mph to avoid any funny business so the other two cars went through no problem.

But as I was coming around this guy didn't even slow down, he just drove straight out in front of me, following the car in front of him. We swerved away from each other and both braked hard, averting disaster.

I was just relieved at first, and looked into the car to see that his two passengers were both like OMG, but then i noticed the driver was glaring at me and mouthing some angry words. So I got mad then, too, and invited him to educate himself on the intricacies of proper motor vehicle etiquette. (That's a loose paraphrase; what I actually said featured lots of bad words and was mostly invective. )

 

[skidmark]

Sure, this is always a fun topic to vent.

I work as a bike courier in a mid-sized (700 thousand) North American city. Every day is a lesson in how close you can come to being hit by a car. Most near-misses, for me at least, involve a car going the opposite way to me turning left while I'm going straight through the same intersection (I guess for brits and aussies it'd be right handed turns that would cause this)... for some reason, they assume that people on bikes don't go faster than 10kph and think they can pull off a turn when I'm 10m from the intersection. This happens every day.

My favorite single instance was some 18 months ago when I was on a major street and a van behind me honked (presumably simply because I was on the road), squealed his tires in acceleration and passed me with less than a foot of room. In these situations, I like to stick out my fist and knock on the side of their car as they pass - makes quite a startling noise inside, and maybe makes them realize that they're a bit close if they were just being ignorant.

This fella apparently didn't like that, and screeched to a halt (on this busy street) - as I pulled up next to his window, he's already rolled it down, and spittle is forming around his raging, gap-toothed mouth. He yells 'you smack my car again, I beat the living f**k out of you!!' I'm not a confrontational guy, and I clearly saw I was not going to reason with him, or convince him that maybe he should be a little more safe. I also don't care too much about antagonizing people and getting the last word. My immediate reaction was to say 'alright man, I totally won't do that then'. He stopped, blinked, and continued 'I said, you smack my car again I beat the living f**k out of you - d'you hear me??' To which I replied 'yeah dude, I hear you loud and clear, I definitely won't be doing that', while giving him the thumbs up as extra reinforcement that I wouldn't be smacking his car. He looked perplexed, looked from me to the road for a second and a half, and peeled away - and then drove 25km/h staring at me in his rearview for a few minutes while people honked at him for holding up traffic, until I just crossed the road and rode through a parking lot to a side street that I was delivering to.

It's sometimes frustrating how people can be so caught up in their own anger and self-righteousness that they don't understand that their recklessness can actually have deadly consequences. Stupid stupid people.

 

[Animal]

Kill them.

 

[Halvor]

Once, I was just riding at the side of the road, then a man began screaming to me, then driving after me. I had to pedal into a gravel road and finally ride on some tracks. I'll never bike there again.. alone. I had not done anything wrong at all...

People often nearly kill me when driving about 5 cm from me, in a very high speed.

 

[Animal]

What country you in?

 

[Halvor]

Oslo, Norway. A newspaper found out that 2/3 of the habitants of Oslo hates cyclists

Had a 1:30 session today, no crashes or nearly accidents

 

[bikingbadger]

Over in Israel things are just as bad if not worse. Getting a license does not necessarily mean that you know how to drive just that you failed enough times for the bureaucratic tape to push you through. Mix in hot weather and short tempers and you've got some seriously neanderthal driving. And thats when I'm in my car. Get onto a bike and things go seriously pear shaped.

 

[lookkg386]

Australian drivers are the worst in the world according to Cadel Evans. LOL, didn't that go down well down here, for the next week all the papers had polls on it, and feedback on the story was full of absolutely disgraceful comments from drivers about cyclists!, couldn't believe what I read.

And of course those couple of weeks they were even worse out there than normal.

 

[Animal]

All of which is why you've got to kill them.