I'm going to have a rant!

No. Will chastised me for using emoticons.
It was a lesson that really hit home.
¬L

That's right, blame the ex-wife.

Oliver,
I'm a courier and have been for several years.

I ride assertivly. I spend 9-10 hours a day in traffic 4-5 days a week. I understand traffic well, where people are most likely to step out, when cars are most likely going to turn with out signaling, when buses are going to swerve into me. I understand this because it is my job to understand this.

Most of the people that are stepping out into me aren't confused. They are distracted, they didn't think that there could possibly be a bike on the other side of that car....etc etc, in other words they didn't think.

To be honest, the shirt isn't an effort to educate and inform, at the end of the day if someone is stupid enough to step into traffic without looking, then I really don't care what they think about my t-shirt.
I think it's kind of a way to bring fun to something really really frustrating in my job... and unlike allot of job related frustrations, this can physically harm me.

Besides, do I really want to live in a completely pc world where everyone goes out of their way to not offend each other?

Besides, do I really want to live in a completely pc world where everyone goes out of their way to not offend each other?

Yeah it's quite expensive

This'd be a good t-shirt:

"Look both ways or look like this"

I stepped out in front of a cyclist and all I got was this permanent facial scaring

or

"I stepped out in front of a cyclist and two years later he tracked me down, murdered my whole family whilst I was forced to watch, then I tripped over running for the phone and broke my nose, just my luck eh?"

I am a post graduate student at Boston University. On average I write about ten thousand words a month. So yes there is an absolute need for me to write in American English. I must know not only the differences between English and American spelling but also something of American grammar. I used to come here and write like I came off the local housing estate (housing project) as a way to relax. However Platini has changed that by jove. No more slovenliness from me. Polkatronixx I hope you are sitting up straight and not slouching as you American chaps sometimes have a tendancy to do.

i must say

i much preferred your posts

when you posted like this.

they were full of character

and made your rhetoric sound poetic..

you don't have to change who you are

especially not for platini.

the pedant Platini

broke my flow of consciousness

and disrupted my karma

something which for me

is not always easy to see

you are right lpg

i need to be who I need to be

spelling bee or no spelling bee

Hello Nhatt,

I think you may have got me slightly wrong, as I feared (this is often a risk when talking about cycle training to very good cyclists). I'm not criticising your riding. I've never seen you ride, and even if I did I wouldn't be qualified to criticise it. (I'm not a cycle trainer.) As I said, I don't doubt that you're an excellent rider, but my point is both more general and more specific: everybody needs to check and update their skills every once in a while (and no, this is normally not done just in everyday riding), and there may be a very simple adjustment to make here. (Who knows?)

I didn't know that you're a courier. Experienced couriers are generally wonderful bike handlers and ride with gusto and confidence. But so do many other classes of excellent bike rider, e.g. strong road riders, and they can still benefit from training. No-one has a perfect skill set. I take it you wouldn't say that you are doing everything right?

If you can accept for yourself that you're probably not doing everything right (for the record, I myself get a lot wrong), or have already accepted it, you'll certainly be in a stronger position than before. None of this is to attack or diminish the pride you must feel in your skill at your job. Even if you're in the top 1% of skilled riders in London, I would still recommend cycle training in the face of a problem such as conflict with pedestrians.

I'm sure you may also feel that I'm trying to locate the fault somewhere in you rather than in the pedestrians who step out without looking. But I'm not allocating blame to anyone or trying to make any allowances for people who walk around without looking. Far from it. This is not about having to manage conflict (which might, if you don't manage it well, put the blame on you in some cases) but about reducing it at source, so that the conflict doesn't even arise in the first place. It's not PC, just best practice in road danger reduction.

The levels of conflict with pedestrians that you seem to encounter certainly seem uncommonly high. I'm saying this from what you've posted and nothing else, so I may be trying to read too much into it. If so, apologies. When riding assertively, which means taking the primary position, riding in the stream of traffic, one would generally not expect to encounter much such conflict at all.

As I'm not a courier, I can't tell whether the fact that you do is job-related, i.e. whether you may be forced by time pressure to ride too fast through areas in which the high levels of interaction would really require slower riding. If so, that would be a regrettable disadvantage of the job.

In either case, room for improvement will be readily identifiable, and training would aim to assess what you're doing right (probably the vast majority of things) and what you're doing wrong (no matter how experienced, we all get something wrong). Again, there may perhaps be small things that you are getting wrong? The job of cycle trainers is to spot these gaps. Some of them are ex-couriers, so you can assume that they probably understand the job and won't be prejudiced about it.

NB the above isn't trying to convince you--the proof of the pudding is not in the talking! Just to inform and clarify. If you're still interested, I might well be able to arrange a free training session for you sometime, PM me if so.

I do hope you don't find the above presumptuous. That's not the intention. Perhaps in reality the level of conflict you do experience is actually quite low and it just sounds like it's high because you're frustrated by it. If so, make of all this reply what you will! It is not meant in any spirit of censure at all.

Best regards,
Oliver.