If you follow news in the cycling community, you’ll know that a petition was started to ask that all road users give cyclists 3 feet of room when passing. If you are a cyclist, you know that sometimes your not even given 6in clearance as a car overtakes you. From a motorists point of view I can understand sometimes why they get so close – I mean, you see cyclists filtering up the side of stationary traffic with little room. But thats stationary. Overtaking someone at speed and not giving enough room can lead to all sorts of problems.

Anyway, I digress – basically, the petition was rejected by “Gordon Brown” on the grounds that the Highway Code contained adequate instruction on how to approach and overtake a cyclist.

The petition lead to discussions from both camps, and some cyclists where against the idea as 3 feet isn’t enough.

This is one of the reasons I am glad that I wear a camera, as, should the case arise, I have footage to prove that the driver is in the wrong. Here are some examples of travelling too close to a cyclist.

I could list 100s more on here, but you get the point. The coach driver shown in the clip above claimed that he had given “miles of space” when overtaking. Wonder if his company would agree if I sent the footage?

Is three feet enough? Probably not. Again, 99 out of 100 drivers give enough room, but that leaves 1 out of every 100 taking the risk.

The most sensible point of view I heard about this discussion was from a driver commenting on a cyclist / car collision and they said that “You need to overtake a cyclist with enough room to allow them to fall off their bike and not end up under your car”.

A perfect way to look at it, and could you live with yourself for destroying someones family when overtaking unneccessarily [sp?] close – I know I couldn’t.

It occurred to me last night driving to football just how much some of our roads are damaged and how the cold weather has made dangerous potholes even more dangerous.

Putting myself as the driver last night I found myself having to evade many of these holes and it was more noticeable as a driver than as a cyclist. Why?

As a cyclist, with a quick look over the shoulder and a slight adjustment you can get round them. If there’s a car coming, its very easy to bunny-hop over a dangerous hole without a second thought, or with thin wheels, to nip through the smallest of gaps between the pavement and pothole and arrive at the other side of the hole safely.

As a driver, its difficult, especially with a car in the outside lane, to do anything other than drive over these potholes, causing untold damage to the underside of your car.

Then, bizarrely, my boss mentioned a new site this morning to me about Potholes where you can register the potholes that you encounter on your journey.

From their front page:
Hit a pothole, found a pothole, or just fed up with potholes?
With potholes estimated to cause as many as 1 in 5 mechanical failures on UK roads and costing motorists an estimated £320 million every year, Potholes.co.uk has been created to help you avoid the cost and misery they cause…

Whether your car’s been damaged by a pothole and you want to know how to make a claim against a local council or you just want to report a poor piece of road, this is the place you’ll find the information you need.

If you’ve got issues with potholes, let others know about them by reporting them and writing a story. On this site find advice from people all across the country who have been through the same thing.

Of course, the CTC have been running a pothole website for a long while.

From their front page:
The Problem
Potholes and road defects are more than just a nuisance, they’re a danger to cyclists. They’re responsible for 12% of compensation claims by CTC members, and local Councils have a duty to fix them.

What can I do?
Councils can’t be everywhere, and if they don’t know about a pothole, they can’t fill it in. So if you want to get it repaired, you have to report it.

Fillthathole.org.uk contacts the right people for you, to get the roads repaired quickly and easily. So you can spend your time riding, not dodging obstacles.

Both have the same message. If a council doesn’t know there is a dangerous pothole on one of their roads then they won’t be able to fix it.