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OPINION

Courteous Or Useless?

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by VecchioJo
Thu, Jan 29, 2009 19:28
6

Now, I appreciate the gesture, but if you're going to follow me any longer finding it impossible to overtake on this wide country road in your you-don't-know-how-wide-it-is-do-you MPV (here's a tip - 2nd gear) can you at least hire a Spanish directeur sportif to lean out the window and scream "Venga! Venga!! Venga!!!" at me.

Thanks.

VecchioJo

Jo Burt has spent the majority of his life riding bikes, drawing bikes and writing about bikes. When he's not scribbling pictures for the whole gamut of cycling media he writes words about them for road.cc and when he's not doing either of those he's pedaling. Then in whatever spare minutes there are in between he's agonizing over getting his socks, cycling cap and bar-tape to coordinate just so. And is quietly disappointed that yours don't He rides and races road bikes a bit, cyclo-cross bikes a lot and mountainbikes a fair bit too. Would rather be up a mountain.

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6 comments

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Blackhound | 15 years ago
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Riding the lanes of the East Midlands we find similar instances to Vecchiojo, plenty of room and not passing. But then you get a big, wide road with nothing coming in good conditions and drivers will blow there horns and shout of windows if we are safely riding two abreast.

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Raouligan | 15 years ago
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Or at least offer you a roll a bar and a couple of waterbottles.....

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Secret Squirrel replied to Raouligan | 15 years ago
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...like this!

http://quickrelease.tv/?p=748

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VecchioJo replied to Secret Squirrel | 15 years ago
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that's stunning

a few weeks ago a small group of us where told it was highly dangerous for us to look behind us, signal and move into a right-hand filter lane to turn right, by a man in a car who had stopped in the middle of the fast road

it's a fine line between "thanks for not trying to squeeze past me" and "for f**ks sake go past me, there's tons of room", and i'm not quite sure where that line is

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Trek Sal replied to VecchioJo | 15 years ago
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I suppose in this male dominated place I'd better stop short of saying women are better drivers than men.

But I bet the courteous, over cautious and possibly useless driver Vecchio encountered was a woman.

I often wonder why men and women motorists are a danger to cyclists in such distinctly different ways.

Cycling up to my local roundabout a maniac screeched past me and took the roundabout almost on two wheels. On the other hand there was a car doing a three-point (or rather eleven-point) turn on the sliproad to the motorway, clearly unable to reverse back.

Not much guessing which was male and which wasn't!

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VecchioJo replied to Trek Sal | 15 years ago
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i'm not going to make sweeping generalisations about certain genders styles of driving because bad driving is bad driving and dangerous in a multitude of ways.

with reference to the others days ride, the driver who passed me knowing exactly how wide their car was and so squeezed past knowing there was room to spare (in their eyes) is as dangerous as the driver i was behind who had no idea how big their car was and so nervously slammed the brakes on any time a car came the other way, or there was a slight bend in the road.

maybe the drivers were the same sex, maybe they weren't.
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