Cycling as transgression

Was training someone today - riding to their right up Pentonville road. We got beeped 3 times , called wankers and gestured to move left by a couple of cabbies. It was unusual nowadays in london so much crap in about 300m

Seems we were breaking some motor centric code -still in this era of london's cycling revolution. When will there be a time when riding in a road not in the gutter be the norm

(Someone also commented on the transgressive act of not wearing a helmet) ho hum

Pentonville is a bitch. Not real wide and lots of commercial traffic = dickheads.

Yes the road encouraged drivers to read our riding manner as transgressive

Lane widths too narrow, a very common problem. Also poor quality of carriageway surfacing near the kerb. Not that David would ever notice this. :)

http://www.invisiblestudio.org/architecture-cycling-and-transgression/

Fear of cycling belongs to a fearful culture (Glassner 2000; Massumi 1993). UK sociologist Frank Furedi (2002) argues that western societies have become dominated by a ‘culture of fear’. We have never been so safe, yet never have we been so fearful. ‘“Be careful” dominates our cultural imagination’ (ibid., viii). We belong to ‘a culture that continually inflates the danger and risks facing people’ (ibid., xii). ‘Activities that were hitherto seen as healthy and fun … are now declared to be major health risks’ (ibid., 4). What is more, ‘to ignore safety advice is to transgress the new moral consensus’ (ibid., 4).[3]

From Dave Horton http://thinkingaboutcycling.com/article-fear-of-cycling/

There's a section of road I travel on very regularly close to where I live. Sometimes 4 times a day. It consists of a major road (Finchley road) and a 2 lane traffic lit junction which cuts across the whole thing*.
Anyway. To turn right into the side road from the main road, I stop at the lights on the outmost lane. The lights for the way ahead change earlier than the ones to the side.

Now here's the kicker, daily, and I mean daily, people in my lane who are actually turning light, will either not notice, or ignore the red light, and pull away from the lights to turn, even if there is absolutely nowhere to go since traffic is passing.
Almost daily, traffic from the other two lanes will make dangerous jumps to get into the third lane ahead of the queue, even though there it's a yellow no stop zone.
The scariest thing is, almost daily and I'm at the head of traffic and in the very visible ASL, people will launch forward only to find I'm not moving and panic/flip their shit.
On more occasions than I'd like to remember, most of the drivers will not even recognize that it's still a red light and they shouldn't be moving. They start beeping the horn or revving their engines to go go go. Further down, I've come to expect punishment passes, so have taken to riding that stretch of road bang in the middle out of sheer defensiveness.
I had one guy come out and start shouting at me to move even though it was rush hour and a stream of cars was blocking the whole route.

Anyway, my point is, using the road a lot, I've noticed similar behaviour in people when either pressed, or observing others.
The car that gave me way earlier, will further down the road smash it past just as the previous two did.
Do people get anxious and want to get to their destination as quickly as possible, or is it monkey see monkey do?

Which junction is that? Is it a split phase?

Do you mean the part where the road splits towards Fortune Green?

edit: If so, I've always thought those traffic lights could use a redesign - two sets, rather than one integrated one.

Still, my least favourite part of the Finchley road is the Finchley Road Station -> Swiss Cottage section, loads of buses pulling out, loads of chelsea tractors turning left up to Hampstead, and to cap it all, it ends in the free for all madness of the gyratory.