Hmmm… New Cycling Blog… Lets check out how it works and see what the interface is like by posting something, then I’ll see whether I can edit it.
I’m sitting thinking for a moment, about happenings on the roads. Not the serious ones, where someone has swerved at you or knocked you off, and certainly not the very serious ones where a cyclist has been badly hurt. I’m thinking about all of the ‘near miss’ events. All of the times when I’ve been honked by someone behind me because they are quite desperate to be stuck behind the car yards in front of me. The times when I’ve had a dose of ‘verbal’ for simply being on the road. And naturally, my first thought is that these people are idiots; moronic car drivers or ‘moton’ as some call them. But then, who is the moton when he gets out of his car? Is he the same person in real life? When he’s walking down the street is he yelling abuse at everyone who is in his way? Or does he just fade into the background?
Theres no getting around it, some people just don’t have the same personality on the roads. Put them behind the wheel of a car and they become just a little bit crazy. Or put them on a bike saddle and they become really rather passive. So when dealing with these daily stresses, the question for any cyclist on the receiving end is how do we get past the moton and impress upon the human underneath that we’re just the same, and that taking risks with out safety or just being flat rude to us is unacceptable?
One Comment
It’s the seemingly widely held perception that cyclists are somehow further down the food chain than motorists which we need to address.
As a society we have bought into the idea that cars are an absolute necessary, we work long hours to pay for the freedom which car ownership promises and then design our lifestyle around them. We absorb the horrendous depreciation and pay over the top rates for car finance in order to buy the model of car which reflects our personality and lifestyle. For what? To sit in a traffic jam whilst a constant stream of cyclists zoom past us.
They call us smug, they mock our clothing, they make jokes about knocking us off, they drive too close and intimidate us because they see us as ‘other’. Rather than understanding that each person cycling is one less car, and it’s cars after all which cause traffic jams, they look at cyclists wizzing past and don’t think ‘Thanks for riding a bike and reducing my journey time’, they think; ‘Oi! You’re CHEATING’!