Things cyclists should know … POV driver who's incapable of cycling

tl;dr Be more visible, don't block overtaking, uk driving test poor, watch out for tinted windows on pickups.

Dare I stick my head above the parapet with this post??

I know there are drivers out there that don't consider cyclists at all. I am not one of them. I consider cyclists a lot. My husband cycles 32 miles a day commuting. I'm all for cyclists not getting knocked down.

It seems to me that a fair amount of cyclists don't drive at all, and I think have never considered cycling from a driver's perspective. Excluding all the things that basically just amount to total twatishness on the behalf of both parties, these are a few things that I think cyclists should be aware of when on the roads.

On visibility

• I can identify cyclists in bright/reflective clothing at a much greater distance than cyclists in dark clothing. The further away you are when I first notice you the better for us all.
  
• One dim light on the front and rear of your bike means that I am a lot closer to you when it becomes apparent that you are a cyclist. Flashing front and rear lights with a decent amount of brightness immediately trigger the 'cyclist' response in my head
  .
  
  

On overtaking cyclists
It is the driver's responsibility and the driver's responsibility alone to determine whether it is safe to overtake another vehicle/road user. Whether it is safe to overtake or not has multiple variables, two of which are driver ability, and vehicle capabilities.

When I come up behind you, at a place that it is not safe for me to pass you, I'm happy to pootle along behind you (at a safe distance) until it is safe to pass you. Please don't

• madly gesticulate for me to pass you, your arm movements causing you to wiggle all over the road. If my initial assessment was that it's not safe to pass you, what you are doing is making passing you less safe.
  
• pull over to the kerb and get off your bike until I have gone past. I'm not mad about the implication that I'm such a poor driver that I can't maintain a safe following distance behind you.
  
  

You reduce my opportunities to pass you safely when:

• you position yourself in the middle of the road, or in the right hand half of the road purely for the purposes of preventing a driver from overtaking you.
  
• you are a group of 3-4 cyclists riding abreast
  
• you are a group of 4 or more cyclists travelling one behind the other. A gap big enough for a car to pull into every two cyclists would be welcomed. A string of 10 cyclists, I would not be able to overtake safely unless on a very long straight road with no oncoming traffic, and those are very few and far between.
  
  
  

Being an imperfect person, when I am behind a cyclist/group of cyclists that could have been overtaken repeatedly had the cyclist/s shown just a little bit of consideration for me, I get ratty and irritable. My patience starts to wear thin from about the third passing opportunity that has been 'blocked'. Its not pretty, but according to Earthloop and the kid, my vitriolic outbursts are comical.

Blind Spots
There is a lot of info out there on how cyclists are not visible to HGVs.
None about how cyclists are not visible to a pickup. Unfortunately the person who originally purchased our pickup, had dark tinted windows put on the canopy.
We can see nothing with the rearview mirror day or night (other than the contents of the load bin) and are totally reliant on the wing mirrors. Visibility in a pickup with a canopy is limited at the best of time, with the shading, horrendous.

• From about a cars length away at the rear, until you are level with the front side windows, you are invisible to the drivers.
  
• Most importantly, when you decide to draft off the left side of me, I don't even know you are there unless I have a passenger that tells me about it.
  
  
  
  

On UK Driving Tests
There is excessive emphasis on 'making progress' in the UK driving test, which I consider, quite frankly, to foster dangerous habits amongst drivers, not only in terms of collisions with cyclists, but in terms of collisions with other vehicles too. Learner drivers are constantly told by instructors that the examiner will think that they lack confidence if they:

• drive slower than at the speed limit
  
• show hesitation at junctions with yield signs and at roundabouts.
  
• show hesitation when merging turning from a minor onto a major road
  
  

What the instructors and examiners consider showing hesitation, I consider making sure its safe.

I felt that these practices were unsafe when I did my UK driving test some 15 years ago (after having been a licensed tested driver in another country for about 12 years before that), and still feel these things create unsafe drivers when reminded of them a few months ago when our daughter did her test.

Take out the tinted windows. If it hinders your ability to drive safely then take them off.

Can we get Oliver to respond to this to avoid the usual pillory?

I agree about the need for flashing front lights. Steady front lights get lost in car headlights and can render a cyclist relatively invisible. I know there are lot of very bright bike headlights at the moment and logic dictates that brighter should be better but I don't believe that this is true.

You reduce my opportunities to pass you safely when:

[*]you position yourself in the middle of the road

where it is safest for me to cycle most of the time.

Something I noticed the other day is that bikes can get 'washed out' by glare if there is a vehicle behind them with bright lights.

On the issue of groups of cyclists. How do you behave when you come across groups of drivers, you know, slowly creeping along?
My money is on you sitting and chilling, not waiting for a gap to pass.
Treat the users of the road as people, not drivers or cyclists. Just chill and wait. The road is for people, doesn't matter what they use to get about. If everyone just relaxed a bit and let others go about their business it would reduce the stress all round.

It seems to me that a fair amount of cyclists don't drive at all, and I think have never considered cycling from a driver's perspective.

You would be wrong. 90% of cyclists also drive - this is proportionally greater than the general population.

You make some good points but, as a driver who doesn't cycle, fail to understand why cyclists often do the things they do that test your patience.

There's a lot in your post that is incorrect, has already been refuted by scientific studies and is already covered in the highway code and good publications such as Cyclecraft and City Cycling. Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with these - it's possible you might gain a better understanding of cyclist/cycling.

I do agree with your thoughts on the driving test though.

You voluntarily bought a dangerous vehicle and would apparently blame any cyclist you hit.
You don't understand that a cyclist might able to see something coming that the driver behind can't. There's too much wrong with what you've written to address it all.

My patience starts to wear thin from about the third passing opportunity that has been 'blocked'. Its not pretty, but according to Earthloop and the kid, my vitriolic outbursts are comical.

You wanna chill out, love. Can I recommend some sort of counselling or anger management?

if you are doing more that 10mph on a non-overtaking stretch of road (double white lines) then it is illegal for a driver to overtake the vehicle, bike or car.

a lot of cyclists know this and cycle in the middle of the road for safety - i.e. it is a dodgy stretch if it has double white lines and a driver shouldn't even be given the opportunity to overtake as it could cause an accident.

I'm glad you dared to stick your head above the parapet, if people didnt we wouldn't have a forum or any chance to learn from each other. I agreed with some of your points and not with others. So I hope you don't mind me adding my bit.

I'm sure there are plenty of cyclists who dont drive but did you know 87 percent of British Cycling members are car owners? (This might not be a representative sample of cyclists.) I'm not keen on looking for discreet groups of road users. Like Adroit says we are all better seen as people. Having said that, its clear that the world would be a better place if everyone considered their actions from others perspectives.

While your right to say bright clothing is more easily identifiable a more interesting question is wether bright clothing is necessary. An alternative would be that we all travelled at a speed where we could stop within the distance of road we can see clearly ahead. There are lots of reasons why cycling safety clothing is counterproductive which I won't go into here.

When cars are waiting to overtake I agree that cyclists arm waving is often more dangerous than helpful. However on your other points regarding overtaking I'm less convinced. The primary position, where cyclists ride out from the kerb is a great way to be safer, visible, away from potholes and to encourage drivers to overtake only when there is enough room. Again I think Adroit made a good point about overtaking a group of cyclists and comparing them to a traffic jam.

I don't see how you can simultaneously advocate cyclists wearing high visibility clothing and continue to drive a vehicle where you have such poor vision. Cyclists should be aware of blindspots and refrain from undertaking or other highway code violations which put them at risk but you need to consider wether your vehicle is part of the problem too.

I think your bang on with regard to the driving test. I don't know if there is a specific campaign to target these issues. Perhaps we could discuss how to tackle this problem in this thread?

None about how cyclists are not visible to a pickup. Unfortunately the person who originally purchased our pickup, had dark tinted windows put on the canopy.
We can see nothing with the rearview mirror day or night (other than the contents of the load bin) and are totally reliant on the wing mirrors. Visibility in a pickup with a canopy is limited at the best of time, with the shading, horrendous.

Sort your car out. The fact that you drive a vehicle with restricted visibility, by choice, makes it hard to take seriously anything you say. It is alarming that you seem to think it is other road users' responsibility to be aware of the fault with your vehicle and act accordingly.

I waved an ambulance through the other night. Fuckers were just sitting on my wheel making me deaf, presumably waiting for the truck/car in the other lane to make a gap large enough for them. I managed to do so without wobbling. I haz mad skillz? I can haz driver lizenz?

While your right to say bright clothing is more easily identifiable a more interesting question is wether bright clothing is necessary. An alternative would be that we all travelled at a speed where we could stop within the distance of road we can see clearly ahead.

It's not an either/or thing though is it ? Driving slower makes cyclists less likely to get hit at the cost of getting there later. Hiviz cycle clothing make cyclists less likely to get hit at the cost of loss of sartorial elegance. Both seem like a good idea to me.

Hiviz cycle clothing make cyclists less likely to get hit at the cost of loss of sartorial elegance.

Not always true, as some drivers risk compensate badly. For some reason they consider people in Hi Viz to be safer so drive more closely to them. Cars in close proximity are more likely to be involved in accidents than ones that are further away.

Cycle training for a week in London or other large conurbation should be a mandatory part of any driving test.

my 2 pence spent.

Nah, every new driver should have to ride to work for a year. They'll forget about the car and life will be roses and puppies..

On visibility

[]I can identify cyclists in bright/reflective clothing at a much greater distance than cyclists in dark clothing. The further away you are when I first notice you the better for us all.
[]One dim light on the front and rear of your bike means that I am a lot closer to you when it becomes apparent that you are a cyclist. Flashing front and rear lights with a decent amount of brightness immediately trigger the 'cyclist' response in my head

I'm interested by these points and have been wondering about this for a little while now myself. Why is it so important to 'identify' cyclists (or any other road user for that matter.). I'd certainly never argue against good lights and light coloured clothes, but the insistence on identification over 'mere' observation and anticipation seems really strange, is it only once something has been identified ("That's a tree in the road!") that action can be taken? Do people not slow down if they don't know what that thing in front of them is?

Anecdotally I've found it to be a common complaint, that it's hard to tell if a blinky red light is a cyclist or not. I have to wonder why it matters though, if you see something and have to think "What's that?" you should be slowing down or taking steps to mitigate any potential issue that may arise. It doesn't matter if that light is a cyclist, pedestrian or simply nailed to a piece of wood on someone's drive. (I regularly slow down whilst driving on country lanes for lights that turn out to be security lights or similar.)

If I am driving down a country lane and a single headlight heads towards us, do we wait until we recognise it as a motorbike or a broken light on a car before moderating my driving?!

Sort your car out. The fact that you drive a vehicle with restricted visibility, by choice, makes it hard to take seriously anything you say. It is alarming that you seem to think it is other road users' responsibility to be aware of the fault with your vehicle and act accordingly.

We will (it is road worthy as is though, it has passed an MOT since we've had it, and it's no worse than a van with no rear window ffs) but this isn't really the point. Ours is not the only one on the road. A thing with a tinted rear window is something that's quite easy to recognise from the rear, so as a cyclist I find it useful to be aware that the driver of such a thing may not have seen me if I'm behind it.

I, personally, am glad to have been informed. But maybe I'm biased in favour of my wife because she's just brought beer home from the supermarket.

Not always true, as some drivers risk compensate badly. For some reason they consider people in Hi Viz to be safer so drive more closely to them. Cars in close proximity are more likely to be involved in accidents than ones that are further away.

This may well be the case but some drivers having poor risk assessment skills doesn't outweigh the massive advantage of more photons being reflected off a cyclist into the eyes of the other drivers.

I know there are arguments for and against everything but to try to argue against being as visible as possible is the logic of a total plonker.

It's not an either/or thing though is it ? Driving slower makes cyclists less likely to get hit at the cost of getting there later. Hiviz cycle clothing make cyclists less likely to get hit at the cost of loss of sartorial elegance. Both seem like a good idea to me.

How is it that I can see a cyclist or a motorcyclist miles ahead, regardless of what they wear?

Because I ride a bike and a motorbike and I keep a look out?

It is called due care and attention. Sadly the norm is well below this, and leads to the "sorry mate I didn't see you" excuse to avoid prosecution.

If we required drivers to try cycling at some point they would have more perception of the need to pay attention.

Similarly if we routinely jailed drivers who didn't pay enough attention they would soon pay more attention.

To expect cyclists to dress in a way that makes them more conspicuous, when I am sure that in your blacked up pick up truck you have the skills to avoid dull silver great cars is a bit rich.

If people felt comfortable riding in normal clothes without having to get suited up as if they were going into battle then more people would do it.
That is what we want isn't it?

Get those windows sorted, buy something that gives you the ability to see adequately, and never use that as an excuse to impinge on the life of someone else using the road.

^^ Of course the fact that I wear mostly black makes me a plonker too.

No it doesn't, black goes with everything.

What I don't understand is why drivers expect us to wear high vis/reflective stuff 'so they can see us', but they make no attempt to help us see them by coating their cars in flouro paint or reflective strips, they just rely on their lights.

I agree that if you're driving a car with functional lights you should be able to see a cyclist a long way off, if you're actually looking.

Therein lies the rub.

Nah, every new driver should have to ride to work for a year. They'll forget about the car and life will be roses and puppies..
tru facts.

Adroit, the benefit of high viz is maximising the chance of an unattentive driver seeing you.

Should we have to wear high viz? No. Does it help? Yes.