30-01-10 Cycling Wrong Way
Clip Submitted By: darrell whittle
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.
