"Cyclists came at the bottom of this heap."
Whether heap or the food chain cyclists are at the bottom. It's a
jungle out there! In this case it's London...
Of course, drivers want bikers OUT. And they are right. Predators and
prey do NOT mix.
'According to The Highway Code, which sells half a million copies a
year, each of which is probably read once, cyclists have equal rights
to the road. The reality on the streets, however, can be very
different. Cyclists often find their journeys punctuated by a series of
near misses: cars making sharp left turns in front of them; car doors
opening unexpectedly and threatening to throw them into the traffic;
drivers on mobile phones clipping them with their wing mirrors. "It is
a series of frustrations and annoyances caused by the idiocy of
drivers," says James, who cycles regularly to work through central
London. "Sometimes I wish I had a spike on the side of my gloves, which
I could scrape down the side of their cars as they cut me up once
again."
Despite what many cyclists will tell you, most drivers aren't actually
out to push cyclists off the road. It's just that they don't think they
should be there in the first place.
"The majority of drivers are not actively aggressive towards cyclists,"
says Stuart Reid, head of the sustainable transport unit at TRL, the
transport consultancy, and co-author of a government- sponsored study
into motorists' attitudes to cyclists. "The relationship is more
complex than that. There is a sense in which drivers don't think
cyclists are as legitimate users of the road as other drivers. They see
them as lower down the pecking order. Drivers will tend to take the
worst examples of cycling behaviour they have experienced and
extrapolate them to all cyclists."
In 2002, Reid and his colleagues interviewed 620 motorists about their
attitudes to other road users. The most common complaint they heard was
that, with roads becoming more congested, "inconsiderate driving", such
as failing to signal or not behaving courteously, simply added to the
stress of getting around. Among many sinners on the road were those
they saw as travelling too slowly, such as elderly or learner drivers -
though for some "unac-some, unacceptably slow" meant driving within the
speed limit - and this, naturally enough, included anyone on two wheels
without an engine.
"There is a strong anxiety among drivers about holding other drivers
up," says Reid. "When drivers encounter something moving slowly, a
pedestrian, say, or a cyclist, they experience a certain amount of
stress and they don't feel the user deserves to be on the road. When
you come up behind a cyclist you are nervous. You don't want to slow
other motorists down and you are nervous the cyclist will do something
unpredictable. Your reaction is to get round the problem and forget
it."
Reid's respondents felt that, whatever The Highway Code might say,
there was a de facto hierarchy on the roads, with larger, faster
vehicles warranting more respect than smaller, slower ones. Cyclists
came at the bottom of this heap.'
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