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I had a similar discussion with a cabbie last night heading home past the Waterloo Imax. He didn't like that I was riding primary into the corner towards the station/Old Vic, beeping and driving right on my wheel. Caught up with him when he got stuck at a red light about 10m after the pass and asked if it was me he was beeping at. The basis of his frustration was that he didn't know where I was going and that "there's a 1.5m path painted on the left, you should use that".
I tried to explain that the buses tend to cut in to the cycle path, the weather, the potholes and the mass of peds about to cross the road also make that 1.5m into a much smaller gap but he wasn't having any of it, so I wished him well (genuinely) and carried on my way.
I'm still trying to find the best way to approach those sort of situations, used to get angry, tried to ignore them for a while and now I'm experimenting with having a more level-headed discussion kinda vibe. I would've liked to have offered to buy him a pint or a coffee and to chat about it some more, he seemed like he was just having a bad day.
First altercation with some guy in a BMW on a recently 20mph-limited stretch of road. His argument flip-flopped somewhere between "you should be in the bike lane" and "you're too slow", which, well, I was going ~36km/h at that point according to GPS in a pretty open area, so you do the maths. What made his entire 'point' especially moot was the fact that all I was really doing was following a car in front with about 10m distance...
Sometimes I wish I could just laugh at those people but they really trigger my anger switch.
(Oh - almost forgot: on the plus side, some guy on a single speed with some nice Cinelli (Mash?) flat-topped bullhorns.)