‘Assuming every driver is out to kill you is the most important thing to learn if you want to cycle home alive’

I was nearly killed last week.

Cycling across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, an oncoming van driver decided that the two cyclists in front of him in a 20mph zone needed to be passed, and that he could do so despite my occupation of the other lane.

Even diving to the side of my lane, his wing-mirror passed my head with a distance so small it’s normally only used by particle physicists.

It was effectively the mirror image of this incident:

Two weeks earlier, at the Clifton mini-roundabout, a BMW driver decided that he didn’t need to give way to me.

Eventually, with enough shouting, he did. I carried on into the side road I use as a low-risk route across that suburb, and discovered he wanted to go the same way.

This gave me a chance to stop and berate him: “You are the kind of BMW driver who gives all us arrogant self-entitled wanker BMW drivers a reputation for being law-breaking and dangerous.”

He didn’t get the irony. He just sat there in his late-mid-life-crisis open-top toy complaining I was holding him up.

That’s the same roundabout where back in February I was forced into roadside snow and ice to avoid being knocked over by someone who felt that driving across the wrong side of the roundabout was acceptable to save a few seconds.

Not a BMW this time – a small Nissan hatchback driven by a couple who looked like they were anticipating their imminent eligibility for free prescriptions.

Which reminds me: I need to chase that near-KSI incident up with A&S police. After harassing the officer at the end of their their submit-video email address, they confirmed last month that they had sent a Notice of Intended Prosecution to driver, but that I would have to chase it up in the central police system.

They’re too overloaded with videos, apparently.

People could say “these weren’t deliberate attempts to kill me”, which, by implication, means “they were all trying to just save 15 seconds at the possible expense of my life”.

Some people’s actions are clearly deliberate. The overweight 55+ driver who, after being held up while I waited for a safe right turn with my son, said: “If you hold me up again, I’ll kill you.”

Looking at him, I felt like he already cost the NHS more per year than my tax bill, and that if he’d ever got the advice “eat less chips”, he’d ignored it. He should get on a bike himself.

Then there are the drivers who believe it is their duty to enforce the highway code, to the extent of swerving over to you as you cycle the other way down a one-way street.

The fact that you are doing it on a signed, legal, contraflow doesn’t seem to matter, nor does the fact that being caught driving illegally tends to incur points on your driving license, not summary roadside execution by Judge Dredd aficionados.

Assuming that every single person driving round Bristol is out to kill you is the most important thing to learn if you want to cycle home alive. If it’s not just the decisions drivers make even after seeing you, it’s when they don’t even look up from their phones as they drift into the near-worthless cycle lanes scattered intermittently round our streets.

Which is why when I saw an article which started, “I nearly killed a cyclist today”, I didn’t think ‘figure of speech’, I thought, ‘her too?’

Followed by mild disappointment that another news outlet had chosen to take up the mantle of click-bait-comment-collecting cyclist persecution now that the Bristol Post is trying to put its dark past behind it.

……………………………….

Read more: ‘It took all my strength not to push the cyclist off’

……………………………….

It was reassuring to read Bristol24/7 Editor Martin Booth’s “shouldn’t have been published” follow-up.

Sadly, that was then followed up by a reluctant apology by the original author, Judith Brown, chair of the Bristol Older People’s Forum, which essentially boiled down to “how could anyone be so stupid as to take it literally”?

The answer to her rhetorical question is: “because we have to every time we pedal out the door”.

And now perhaps we can assume that the Bristol Older People’s Forum will be crossing “safe cycling for the elderly” from their goals, and replacing it with “it is okay to kill cyclists”.

At this point, many readers will be asking, non-rhetorically, “why do you cycle around Bristol then?” Sometimes I ask myself exactly that.

When you drive back from a supermarket you don’t ever think “that’s it – I’m going to stop driving.”

When you cycle back, sometimes you open one of the beers and savour your survival, thinking “from now on I drive there”.

Or after a particularly stressful school run, you conclude that setting off ten minutes earlier in the car and the time wasted looking for a pavement to park on is the better choice.

If I do stop cycling, what then? After a few months driving round Bristol I’ll inevitably adopt the same driving style everyone else has: treating give way signs at junctions as a mild hint, parking on school-keep-clear signs to unload a late child, accelerating to get through zebra crossings before that frail pensioner with a walking stick steps out and holds me up for 30 seconds on my way to that queue at the traffic lights I can see a short distance away.

If Judith Brown wants every cyclist to have a number plate and means of sounding their presence, well, my own mid-life crisis high-performance toy is sitting outside and feeling in need of attention.

I’ll have that number plate, and have a horn to sound when one of Judith’s Bristol Older People’s Forum members has the audacity to try walking across a road I’m about to turn into.

It also has a little switch by the gear lever to switch the automatic transmission from Eco-Pro “smug wanker” mode with its stop/start engine, efficient gear policy and lightly regenerative braking into the Sport or Sport+ mode, where I can pull out in front of other cars at roundabouts on a whim, break the 70mph speed limit before I’m halfway up the ramp from the M32 to the M4, and use nanometres myself as the unit of separation between me and any Nissan hatchback driver who thinks they have the right to get into the “German car” lane on the very same motorways.

Yes, I’ll be endangering the lives of everyone else. But nobody will be trying to kill me, so it’ll be for the best.

Your call Judith, your call.

The Bristol Traffic blog has been documenting our city’s traffic issues since 2008. Some people consider it satire. Read it at www.bristolcars.blogspot.com

Read more: From the Editor: ‘Four wheels good, two wheels better’