Why I Can't Stand Cyclists who Overtake other Cyclists on the Inside

Wheezing slowly up a not-particularly steep hill on my far-from-lightweight bike, my backpack stuffed with books about the European Union, I heard the sounding rasping rapid breath at my left shoulder and months later was overtaken, on the inside, by another cyclist, one of those scowling depersonalised clones in uniform Lycra and a plastic helmet, i-player buds jammed in his heedless ears,  who have multiplied in their hundreds of thousands in the past ten years. In my view any theoretical gain form wearing the helmet is completely cancelled out by the added danger from not being able to hear what is behind you properly).

 

 Had I turned left just then, as I might well have done, there would have been a bad accident and it would have been entirely his fault.  I have to say I wish I could have caught up with him and told him a few home truths. I greatly fear him and people like him, and their irresponsible and self-righteous stupidity is a growing danger.  I have grown better at anticipating it, but I still haven���t trained myself to expect it as often as it actually happens.

 

The road was reasonably wide and not busy. He could perfectly well have overtaken me on the outside. I actually think he went on the inside deliberately, as some sort of thrill (it happens so often in irrational unjustifiable circumstances that I have been forced to this conclusion).

 

  I was a little way out in the road because, like most sensible cyclists,  I expect danger from any parked car. The most likely is that one of its doors will suddenly be flung open in my path. The other (especially in these days of near-silent electric cars, where the tell-tale plume of exhaust and mutter engine are absent) is that the car will swing out without warning. It���s always been my rule to assume these dangers.

 

I ride, in fact very defensively. While riding, I adopt an attitude of total mistrust of all motor vehicles. I assume (often correctly) that their drivers may technically have seen me, but have not registered me as a significant object. Where the car has (illegal) tinted windows, I assume this twice over. When nice, kind, decent motorists offer to give way to me, I stonily ignore them, because I cannot square their (rare) behaviour with the indifferent or hostile road etiquette of the majority. I have to maintain my defensive hostility at a high pitch all the time. It's often reciprocated, and quite unprovoked. Many believe (I think they got this off a TV ���personality���) that I am not entitled to use the road because I ���don���t pay road tax���. Few remember anything of the Highway Code, especially about showing consideration to other road users.

 

I won���t say my ultra-defensive attitude keeps me safe. There is no safety on the road. I���d just say it has kept me safer than I would have been if I hadn���t adopted it, long ago, when I was one of the very few adult cycle commuters in London or indeed in the country, and was mocked or despised by colleagues for my eccentricity.

 

 

Since then, many aspects of cycling have got much better. Cycle lanes are a lot better than no cycle lanes, though they often turn abruptly into car parks or run out when you need them most. Brakes now work in the rain. They used not to, even the expensive leather ones which were better than nothing. Gears are simple and easy to use, quite unlike the old feeler-gauges on the frame, so placed that you had to let go of the handlebars to use them. The bikes themselves are lighter and stronger,  the tyres tougher, lights a thousand times better and more conspicuous, reflective gear far easier to obtain and inventively designed.

 

But drivers are more heedless and more hostile, and the law against driving while texting or phoning is, to all intents and purposes, dead as it is almost never enforced. And then there are the other cyclists. They havem, in recent years, made riding far, far more dangerous.

 

I am not a purist. Sometimes, at vicious junctions designed by homicidal traffic planners to force cyclists into the paths of speeding juggernauts, I will cautiously ride on the pavement, giving way to pedestrians if they appear. I���ve even been known to ride the wrong way up a  brief stretch of (deserted) one-way street, rather than ride half a mile to stay legal.  At any sign of oncoming traffic, I will dismount. At some very slow-to-change traffic lights I will dismount, wheel my machine past and then remount, to show respect for the law. I might have gone through one or two as they changed from amber to red.  But I regard deliberately riding through a red light ( especially on a pedestrian crossing) as a serious sin, as well as an offence.

 

There���s a simple reason for this. The law is what protects us.  Nothing else does. If you drive around in a  ton of steel and  glass, and drive through a red light, you probably won���t be badly hurt if it goes wrong. The same���s not true if you���re on a bike.  If red lights are just advisory or some sort of leftover Christmas decoration, then it won���t be the people in the cars or the lorries that have most to lose. And if the law protects you,  you should protect the law, all the time and especially when it doesn���t suit you. I simply don���t buy the claim that jumping red lights is safer. Staying ahead, where you can be clearly seen, is clearly safer than being stuck alongside a big lorry. But it���s not the only choice. If you can���t get ahead, then stay behind. There���s not that much hurry, anyway.  

 

The same is true, in a  slightly different way, about overtaking on the inside. When in motion on a two-way road, it���s almost impossible to drive or ride safely if you have to watch both sides in the mirror, or glance repeatedly over both shoulders, and keep an eye on the road ahead for crazies coming towards you in the middle of the road.  You���re not even supposed to do it on Motorways, where the head-on danger is a lot less. Any driver knows that you shouldn���t do this.

 

Cyclists do (I do) ride slowly and cautiously alongside stationary or very slow-moving cars on the inside in some circumstances, though I much prefer to pass them on the offside. This is awkward, and unlovely but there's a good reason for it. It is often essential if you are to make any progress on the jammed roads of modern Britain. It is not ideal. The fear of the suddenly opened door is even greater when you are doing this than when you are riding past parked vehicles.  In many cities there are actually cycle lanes where this is encouraged by the authorities. Urban drivers have, I think, grown accustomed to it and the risk is, in any case,  much more to the cyclist than it is to the driver.  

 

But why do cyclists (who have so much to fear from, a war of all against all on the roads) repeatedly and needlessly do it to other cyclists who have left a sensible distance between themselves and parked cars? Or who are simply riding a reasonable distance out into the road to assert their freedom to be there?  I can't see what they gain. I can see it causing horrible needless accidents. I am growing used to it and am learning to expect this stupidity alongside all the others I see on the road. But it still seems to me to be irrational, verging on the spiteful. Can anyone explain?