"Neil Williams" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 18:55:52 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
wrote:

I'd rather that offences committed on a bicycle (exceeding speed limit,
riding while over the alcohol limit, riding through red lights or occupied
zebra crossings, overtaking on the left a vehicle that's indicating left)
were treated as motoring offences and generated points on your driving
licence if you hold one - or a summary fine if you don't.

I don't believe points are appropriate, unless a cycling licence is
introduced. Otherwise, those who do have a car are punished more
harshly than those who do not.

I would be supportive of a suitably large fine.

Incidentally, it is my understanding that the drink-drive limit does
not apply to bicycles per-se, and as such that you'd be convicted of
something different if caught cycling dangerously due to having
consumed too much alcohol. This probably isn't a bad thing, as you're
a whole lot less likely to kill someone cycling badly at 10mph than
you are driving a car at 30. (This is not a justification for drunken
cycling, merely a comparison of the two rather different modes of
transport involved).

I disagree. If you're on the road between one kerb and the other,
drink-drive laws should apply: you don't have to hit someone to cause an
accident. IF you cause another vehicle to go out of countrol (possible
causing much more damage than you yourself could cause) because he was
trying to avoid hitting you, you should bear 100% of the blame. My inabilty
to stop does not prevent it being your fault that the accident happened. NB:
I don't mean "you" personally ;-)

And I'd like to
see cyclists required to carry third-party insurance to cover damage to
cars
when they try to overtake and scratch your car or when they cause other
drivers to swerve to avoid an accident, hitting something else in the
process.

Many of them do, in the form of their household insurance, believe it
or not.

Really? So if a cyclist causes damage to a car as it's overtaking in a gap
that's too narrow or if he runs into a pedestrian on a zebra crossing or
hits a car by failing to stop at a give way / stop / red light, the injured
party can claim on the cyclist's house contents insurance? I never knew
that.

If car drivers "swerve to avoid an accident, hitting something else in
the process", they haven't avoided an accident, incidentally, they may
well have *caused* one. While I won't defend poor cycling or driving,
if you drive assuming that others *will* do something stupid or
dangerous, you're unlikely to hit them or anything else. I have lost
count of the number of times I have avoided accidents, both in my car
and on a bike, by having suspected someone was about to do something
stupid/illegal/dangerous and taking suitable and safe evasive action
before said act was perpetrated.

I define "cause" as "root cause" - the knock-on chain of resulting collisons
can be traced back to the root cause. Yes - drive defensively: assume that
people might turn across your path without indicating or might overtake you
where you can see that it's not safe. But don't use that as an excuse for
the person who caused the accident in the first place to evade the full
weight of punishment.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen w*nkers in sports cars come
up behind me and then try to overtake into the path of an oncoming car that
I've seen but the w*nker hasn't. It's got to the stage where I'm getting
ready to hit the brakes as soon as the w*nker pulls out to overtake, to give
him chance to pull in ahead of me when he realises he's cocked it up.
Likewise when you're the oncoming car: last week I saw a long stream of cars
coming towards me - probably about five cars behind a tractor. Immediately I
think "what if a pillock decides to overtake". Sure enough, a Moron in a
Maserati (TM) pulled out from the back of the queue and began to overtake
one, two, three cars. By this stage I was hard on the brakes (the skidmarks
are still there) with headlights and horn on. Still he kept comingOnly when
he'd overtaken the tractor and passed within a hairsbreadth of sideswiping
me did he pull in - but not before giving me "the finger". Dammit, the guy
couldn't even swear in English - he had to use an American insult ;-)


I'm not, however, a perfect driver or cyclist; I have been involved in
accidents on both means of transport over the years.

As a cyclist, I always resist the temptation to overtake on the left
because
as a driver I know how dangerous it is.

Agreed. It would help if junction layouts were not set up to
encourage cyclists to do this. Things like advanced stop lines are
not really helpful to the cyclist or the car driver.

Agreed. Oxford is terrible for that. As a cyclist in traffic that's crawling
along, I take up a space behind the car in front, in the middle so he can
see me in his mirror and so the car behind me can see me. And I crawl
forward just the same as everyone else. When the traffic gets moving, I can
probably accelerate to 10 mph faster than most cars, but then I'm outpaced
and move back to the left hand side of the road out of the way. I've
actually found that a very large majority of motorists are very
cycle-friendly. Shame that a great proportion of cyclists are not
car-friendly.

That's the sort of
riding that is indefensible and is a reason why (IMHO) bikes *do* need
recognisable registration plates. If he'd had plates, I'd have stopped as
soon as it was safe and reported him to the police, as I suspect many of
the
other affected motorists would.

Perhaps, but the police would have taken no action as it'd be your
word against his (unless others also reported him, I suppose), hence
why I would prefer more actual police officers out and about. You'd
also have a job enforcing cycling bans.

Sadly that's the case. It's tempting to buy a video camera and stick it on
the roof of my car to record as evidence what I've seen. You can't station a
policeman at every junction to catch idiots like that, and even if you did,
he'd have a job getting into his car and struggling through the traffic to
catch up with the idiot on the bike. Better to have some foolproof way of
gathering photographic evidence to convict: maybe traffic light cameras
should have the camera facing the traffic, continuously recording the
traffic and preserving the last few seconds leading up to someone going
through the red light - that way you've got a better chance of identifying
the driver/rider as well as the vehicle. I saw a similar system on
Tomorrow's World about 10 years ago to monitor collisions at junctions in
Japan, but it never seems to have taken off.

As a matter of interest, how many people need to report a "his word against
yours" offence before the police will investigate and convict?


I was once driving down the A34 and I saw a car with his brake lights
permanently on. Several times he had to brake and other cars nearly went
into the back of him. I got his number and called in at my local police
station to report him. The police were not interested and made me feel an
idiot for even reporting him, when it ought to be a simple task to trace him
on the DVLC computer and arrange for a policeman to call round (or even a
letter to be sent saying "do you know...?") sometime over the next few days.
Had I been driving at 75 mph or had I gone through a red light at 3 AM when
there was manifestly no other traffic around, I bet they'd have been only to
pleased to investigate.