Today's brush with death...

[emmelinemay]

I got hit by a car this morning.

Well, sort of.

Offord Road has cars parked all the way along both sides, and it's common for traffic to have to wait while one side clears until there's enough space to drvie down it. Being a fairly safe cyclist, I tend to wait along with the cars rather than head out into the middle and risk ARRGHness. (Offord Road is the same road where i had the pot-hole incident, and the opening-car door into me incident).

So I'm behind a car, next to a parked van, waiting for the oncoming traffic to clear. I'm not right to the left hand side, I'm centred, part of the traffic and know there are 4 cars behind me and another cyclist. It clears, car in front of me moves off, and I follow. Car behind me either doesn't see me (despite the fact i'm RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM) or is pissed off at being behind a cyclist and STEPS on that pedal and ZOOMS past me with a clearance of about 1". Unfortunately for him, my handlebars are slightly wider than the rest of me, and he smashes his wing mirror into my handlebars, the wing mirror flies off at my head and that crazy cyclist self-preservation kicks in and somehow I deflect the wing mirror away from my face with my arm.

Guy in parked van, driver behind me and cyclist behind me all stop to check I'm ok, and reassure me the man in the car is a wanker and could have killed me. Man in car stops, and gets out SLAMMING his door and GLARING at me for daring to have been there at all as he comes to pick up his wing mirror. As he passed, he looked like he was going to say something, but a barrage of abuse from the other drivers around me, man in van, and other cyclist clearly made him think better of it. He didn't say sorry though.

I couldn't be arsed to have any altercation, so I just muttered some obscenity at him and cycled off. It wasn't until I was almost at work I realised how much I was shaking.

I'm totally unhurt, not even a bruise where the wing mirror hit me, so pretty lucky really!

So this week, so far, I've had a cyclist cut me up, two pedestrians walk into me when stepping onto the road without looking, 3 motorcyclists swerve to avoid me as they zoom up the left hand side of stationary traffic and one car totally fail to acknowledge I'm even there.

My rage is not confined to merely drivers, but to ALL humans who fail to LOOK TO THEIR FUCKING LEFT.

Comments

[emmelinemay.livejournal.com]

good point! Pedestrians also do regularly fail to look left however, when crossing a side road that cars turn left onto from a busy road. They often have push chairs.

[kynon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've encountered something similar - most often actually when crossing Princes Street to go up the Mound in Edinburgh - there have been numerous times when there's been people waiting to cross at the bottom of the Mound, and they've got the pushchair containing their child sticking out into the road...right on the second part of the fairly tight chicane-type path that you have to take when you drive across...which has resulted in some amusing use of car-horn, brakes, swerving, and choice expletives.