Blame cyclists for stoking the flames of the road culture war - The Telegraph 17/6/22

[libraryguy]

The self-appointed sheriffs of Britain’s highways and cycle lanes, with their Twitter feeds full of GoPro footage, are simply infuriating.

Our land was once riven by Roundheads and Cavaliers; four centuries later, battlelines are drawn between cyclists wielding GoPro video cameras and other road users. The odd truth of this came home to me this week when 77-year-old Wayne Humphreys notched up a fine and costs totalling £4,500 after a magistrate deemed he’d left insufficient room when overtaking a cyclist near Bridgend (Humphreys had only accrued one other offence in 60 years of driving, for doing 34 mph in a 30 zone). I examined the video footage and my own expert judgment was: “Lucky devil – that’s three times the space bus drivers give you in Cambridge.”

I spend half my life on two wheels, so I’m mustard-keen on motorists giving bikes safe passage. Equally, I loathe the self-important, bulging-calved, Lycra-clad, road-hogging behaviour of Serious Cyclists on their 10-grand racers – mowing down pedestrians and yelling obscenities at Nissan Micras.

My animosity was honed in Richmond Park: a favourite London haunt, until it was ruined by packs of Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) bearing down on you like Tolkien’s Nazgul. Stars will die and civilisations fall before these sinewy terminators will slow to let a family cross the road. They don’t gaze upon the deer or trees, but pedal in circles like android hamsters. Cars can’t exceed 20 mph in Richmond Park, but the new puritans flash by with homicidal velocity. Even so, I don’t whip out my iPhone to record their trespasses against humanity. Because if there’s one thing worse than calling your mate Pete to announce, “I’ve just beaten my personal best”, it’s a determination to get other road users into trouble.

In fact, it’s my observation that sharing incriminating GoPro footage has become the province of people who once campaigned to be school prefects just so they could report fellow pupils to teachers. The type of person who enjoyed lockdown, because they could dob in their neighbour for going out twice in one day. You never see them admitting, “Yes, I’ve made a few mistakes in my time.”

They don’t confess to cycling the wrong way up a one-way street and making a stressed-out mum perform an emergency stop. In Cambridge, cyclists mount pavements, jump lights, whizz the wrong way up “pedestrianised” Trinity Street and let fellow students ride pillion. It’s like Gotham City at its most lawless, but I still don’t pull out my iPhone to get a second-year physics student sent down.

Nor do the GoPro cycling vigilantes concede their own motoring mishaps in a Volvo estate: that time they missed the turning to their friend’s Huf Haus in Norfolk and stopped so suddenly the postie rear-ended them. My friend Hugh can’t have been the only person to have flung open a black cab’s side-door to find he’d tipped a hipster off his penny-farthing – one bystander cheered.

The self-appointed sheriffs of Britain’s highways and cycle lanes, with their Twitter feeds full of GoPro footage, are somewhat entertaining. But the “two wheels good, four wheels bad” vibe makes me want to station these cameras by Vauxhall’s frantic cycle paths to see how much grace cyclists give pedestrians.

However, the cavaliers won the last war (eventually) and I expect they’ll triumph in this one. I advise mayoral candidates to ban GoPros and campaign on a “Go Slow” platform.

[salus.populi]

Wow, who knew it was so easy to be a columnist in a national paper.

[Little Londoner]

Wow, who knew it was so easy to be a columnist in a national paper.

It's always easier telling the truth you have to have a very good memory to remember the lies if you are untruthful.

Do these camera laden cyclists also send in the illegal maneuvers THEY make.

[libraryguy]

It's always easier telling the truth you have to have a very good memory to remember the lies if you are untruthful.

Do these camera laden cyclists also send in the illegal maneuvers THEY make.

What do you think?

[local]

We don't really see enough cyclists gopro's or not to get excited.


Soon as you see the camera you know they are a bit simple, best to feel sorry for them.

[donkey22]

We don't really see enough cyclists gopro's or not to get excited.


Soon as you see the camera you know they are a bit simple, best to feel sorry for them.

I’m assuming your infantile statement would also apply to motorists using dashcam’s?

[sandGroundZero]

Wow, who knew it was so easy to be a columnist in a national paper.

"The driver, Wayne Humphreys, from Pontyclun, was contacted and offered a course. The ‘What’s Driving Us’ course is offered to drivers/riders as an alternative to prosecution for the offence of driving without due care and attention."
"Mr Humphreys failed to accept this course and later failed to comply with a fixed penalty notice. This resulted in him appearing in Cardiff Magistrates Court on 8th June 2022. He was found guilty of driving without due care and attention. He received 4 penalty points on his license, given a £1152 fine, £620 costs, and a £115 victim surcharge."

— Driver hits out at 'appalling' £1,152 fine

___________________________________________________________________________

After graduating with a degree in English Literature from Oxford, Pelling started working at the satirical magazine Private Eye and then GQ magazine. In 1997 she transformed Jamie Maclean’s Erotic Print Society’s slim foolscap newsletter into the Erotic Review, a popular magazine whose circulation peaked at over 30,000. She sold the magazine in 2004. — Rowan Pelling

[local]

I’m assuming your infantile statement would also apply to motorists using dashcam’s?

Heaven forfend have we disturbed a lesser spotted Gopro user?

I can't say I'm surprised.

What a hoot.

[donkey22]

Heaven forfend have we disturbed a lesser spotted Gopro user?

I can't say I'm surprised.

What a hoot.

You didn’t answer my question. I could try and simplify it further if that helps?

[The PNP]

You didn’t answer my question. I could try and simplify it further if that helps?

Lol..Standard 'local' practice. If he don't like the question, he don't answer it!

[donkey22]

Lol..Standard 'local' practice. If he don't like the question, he don't answer it!

He also struggles with words that contain two or more syllables.

[local]

He also struggles with words that contain two or more syllables.

Your still a bit bitter over your fake university aren't you


Still, I'm glad you have your friend PNP to help support you, perfect coupling you could do some adult learning classes together, any of the sciences would help the pair of you.


Happy to confirm that cyclists with GoPros on their helmets are a sad lot deserving of sympathy and I don't make your connection with dashcams.

I just have this picture of two intellectual vacuum's on a tandem

A couple of Henrys.

[donkey22]

Your still a bit bitter over your fake university aren't you


Still, I'm glad you have your friend PNP to help support you, perfect coupling you could do some adult learning classes together, any of the sciences would help the pair of you.


Happy to confirm that cyclists with GoPros on their helmets are a sad lot deserving of sympathy and I don't make your connection with dashcams.

I just have this picture of two intellectual vacuum's on a tandem

A couple of Henrys.

Lol. The irony of you getting confused over the words “your” and “you’re” in your opening sentence.
At least I made it beyond key stage level 2 in English.
There must be plenty of help out there for your learning difficulties. Reach out, don’t feel ashamed.

[The PNP]

I don't make your connection with dashcams.

Presumably 'cos you've a dashcam yourself - pot, kettle, black, lol!

[MICK/GILLY]

All the dash camera footage shown on here show cyclists going through red lights, riding erratically no handed or on the phone or undertaking traffic turning left without due care and attention and without regard to safety or being a distraction to real road users by riding naked. So far they have only come across as fake know it all log burning pretend magistrate electrical wizards that try to appear to folk that don’t care as more than they really are by picking up peoples spelling of all things and a don’t do as I do.. do as i say imaginary climate friendly stance when all their real claim to fame and lifetime achievements amount to is that they can ride a bicycle…. badly, often interpreting old and new rules to suit themselves, again with a disregard for common sense and the safety of themselves and others.
The other day I saw an old lady riding a bicycle with bedding plants in her basket, a real picture she was, she was riding slowly and carefully paying attention, I thought to myself now that’s a real cyclist. Other than that cyclists are just a sad bunch of moustaches dressed in Lycra trying to race cars with a childlike mentality or chasing tractors down the bypass on the road. These are road users that nobody likes, respects or wants in the way. They are accidents just waiting to happen either to themselves or unsuspecting elderly and all they have got in their defence is “ your stupid, you are uneducated you can’t spell bicycwaw” . Fkin simple pricks. This is why you need a dash camera in your car.