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@dancing james
Just spoke with the cabbie from last night. The police turned up not long after I left, the driver lives locally, but not surprisingly she did not return home last night. As such she will get off without a drink driving charge.
There is full CCTV of the incident from a couple of local establishments, it shows her crashing, the lights being red, and her driving off. So fairly much caught bang to rights.
In all her protestations of innocence last night she never once asked the cab driver if he was ok, or if she could help. By not leaving her details at the scene she is very likely to be prosecuted for leaving the scene of the accident, especially as the driver was hurt and being checked out by the ambulance driver.
A cab driver was on the other side of the road and saw the entire thing, there is the CCTV footage and my account which all sound like they corroborate the same story. The damage to the back of the cab indicates she was doing in excess of 30 mph when the impact occurred, it has already been inspected by a garage.
I hope the police do contact me for a statement. I will be very clear as to what happened and her subsequent behaviour including slurring of words, drinking fluids and eating mints like they were going out of fashion. The cabbie and myself agreed given where she lives, the car she drives etc, that she will be able to afford any increase in insurance premiums, and that sadly the incident will unlikely have any significant impact on her future driving habits.
I feel frustrated with losing my rag with her last night. But given her lack of sincere apology, blatant denials of responsibility, lies about the lights being green, the cab stopping suddenly and me not having any lights on I am clear that she is an utterly dangerous cunt who regrettably is likely to carry on driving because she can pay her way out of the problems that would stop anyone else.
I have spent a lot of the day feeling quite shocked and questioning what I did. I don't think there was anything wrong with my cycling, positioning or filtering strategy, the lucky things were that I filtered and did not remain behind the cab and I did not move in front of the cab when I entered the ASL. Either of which would have been quite usual things to do. As the cabbie said, we would not be having any conversation today if I had waited behind him and things could have been pretty bad if I had been in front of the cab.