In my mind as I cycle to and from work I have been making a mental note of what cars on average it is worth avoiding or at least taking more care when near them. What follows is a list of the cars and drivers to take special care of when they are near.
Worst make of car
This has to be the mini (on the sly a friend of mine confirmed this independently and without prompting). Generally speaking drivers of mini’s seem to have an issue with cyclists. The car that has most often cut me up, turned left in front of me or just generally not given me any space has to be the Mini. I have tried to figure this out – they are neither a taxi nor a low value car (see below) but yet they seem to have a real issue with bikes. I have pondered on this from time to time, I came up with the conclusion that they see themselves as nippy about town vehicles and the bike riders are stealing their thunder. Or maybe because (for a laugh) Madonna once owned a mini, they feel that they are in some way superior to us other lesser mortals? Or it could also be the fact that Mini’s are driven by tossers.
Worst Professional Drivers
No it is not the white van drivers, generally speaking I find these guys OK. I was never a lover of Black Cab drivers even before I owned a bike (except for when I needed to get somewhere and wanted to pay an over inflated price). They are forever pulling out from the curb without indicating or just generally expecting other drivers to have innate ESP regarding their next manoeuvre. So what do I not like about Taxi’s – well primarily they always seem to stop at light or in traffic as far over to the left as possible – so you are working your way down the left hand side through a stream of traffic queuing up at the latest road obstruction and then you have to move over to the right to go past the taxi, I am sure this is some joke amongst the taxi community that they like to play on bikes.
The one bonus of Taxi’s that block the road like this, is you can at least have a ready insult – generally speaking due to the nature of their job they suffer from being fat gits – therefore less creativity is needed in coming up with a verbal – just use any insulting term and append “fat” to the front e.g. “fat moron”.
The second thing I dislike about Taxi’s (though to be fair this is not their fault) is the fact they come down the bus lane. I realise we have to share and share alike but with buses and motorbikes to worry about the bus lane gets more and more dangerous. With Buses you can be sure that except on hills you can go faster than them so once they are overtaken that is it and the bus lane is pretty safe until the next bus comes along to overtake, but now you still have to be on the lookout for motorbikes and taxi passing you by ever so close.
General Type of Car to Avoid
My third vehicle of shame goes to (and yes this is very generalised) cheap older cars. Let’s be honest here (and totally politically incorrect) if you have a rubbish cheap car, further embellished by the fact that it is so old that it would be dead if it were a Great Dane, it is generally not going to be driven by a intelligent person, who would by default have a higher wage earning potential and therefore a better car. Therefore these vehicles we can assume are driven by morons, if something is driven by a moron (see buses in a previous post) then they are not going to make the smartest moves on the road, so watch out for them! It is also fairly reasonable to state that such a car also stands a much higher potential of being uninsured and the brakes etc. will also probably not be in the best condition. Therefore if you get hit by one of these rust buckets of the road you stand a good chance of not being paid for lost work and medical bills (let alone emotional distress) whilst you convalesce in hospital! You have been warned.
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