Why do cyclists make car drivers boil with rage?

Rosamund Urwin

ONCE interviewed a cyclist who had taken a car door to the neck. “I felt the impact and was surprised my head was still on my shoulders,” she recalled. The blow fractured her thyroid cartilage and severely damaged her vocal cords. She spent t wo months in hospital while the Royal London’s doc tors performed reconstruc tive surgery. When we met her voice was still raspy and she had a tracheostomy tube sticking out of her neck.

This is why most cyclists don’t hug parked cars while riding down a road. And yet this approach — which is recommended in the Highway Code — is often enough to ignite the wick of drivers’ dynamite-like rage. Sometimes they rev their engines behind you, the auto equivalent of tutting loudly. That may escalate to honking. The more ag gressive will then attempt a “punishment pass”, coming far too close. And then sometimes, they go full Colonel Kurtz, getting out of their vehicles and yelling because you’ve added seven seconds to their journey time. Even though the getting-out-andyelling t a ke s l o n ge r than seven seconds.

Last year this happened to me. It was a windy day and I was leaving a tracheaprotecting distance between myself and the stationary cars. A woman tooted behind me. She overtook, slamming her foot on the accelerator, only for me to get back ahead at the lights. Thi s prompted her to get out, shrieking: “I’m going to run you off the road, you fat b****.” Her teenage daughter was in the passenger seat.

Now, it’s happened to Jeremy Vine, the Radio 2 presenter. Vine, who wears a helmet-cam, recorded a driver in Kensington tailgating him, then hurling abuse, and finally jumping out and threatening him. Her behaviour was undisputedly abhorrent. And yet, a few drivers mounted a defence.

A columnist for another paper wrote: “I’d be lying if I said I had never expressed similar sentiments internally when trapped behind a painfully slow, wobbly, middle-aged cyclist.” Vine hardly seems a pootler but t h i s a t t e mpt a t a n a r g u ment doesn’t reflect well on drivers. It shows how entitled some can be, believing the road is theirs above all others, and how partisan — reflecting a particular intolerance for cyclists as an obstacle when we’re just one of many.

Thi s ha t re d o f us re nder s them illogical too. In London the average speed of a c ar in rush hour i s an estimated 14.8mph. Cars often queue behind other cars — shouldn’t that make their blood boil even more than being slowed temporarily by a cyclist? During a traffic jam, then, they could all get out and yell at each other. And themselves.

I’d rather they didn’t, though, since we cyclists will be trying to weave through the traffic to get past them. Because what drivers conveniently overlook when they rant about slow cyclists is that they often hold us up too. My commute takes half the time on a car-free road. And at least they have an engine to get them going again — I have to rely on my quads.

In my 16 years of cycling on London’s streets I’ve come across many drivers whose default setting towards us is naked malice, who treat us like a subspecies, t h e Ne a n d e r t h a l s o f the commute.

What an odd reason to hate or judge someone: their mode of transport. And what they are overlooking is that we’re often one of them too: most cyclists can drive. Riding a bike has actually made me safer behind the wheel, making me more aware of other road-users. They might like to try it too.