Remember Rule 163

[emperor]

I would like to remind everyone of rule 163 [0]. It exists to protect a vulnerable minority who are regularly subjected to abuse and intimidation by a more powerful group. That intimidation and abuse nearly always goes unpunished unless injury results, and if this minority are killed and a prosecution occurs, the penalties are relatively small. I'm talking about cyclists.

Rule 163 states, amongst other things "give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car", which is sadly not very clear, but is helpfully illustrated:



It is my experience that many many drivers ignore this rule entirely if obeying it would mean the slightest delay to their journey. When you're in a car, please remember rule 163, and give cyclists plenty of room; if you're not driving, encourage the driver to do so, especially if they are a professional driver.

When commuting, I find I often have an unpleasant choice to make - either I cycle in the primary position, in the center of my lane, and get shouted and honked at and overtaken dangerously by some drivers who want to punish me for holding them up, or I cycle in the secondary position (about 1m from the kerb) and get people squeezing past with inches to spare because they are trying to overtake even though there is oncoming traffic and it's not safe to do so. This is quite frankly unacceptable.

On one evening cycle home, one taxi driver passed me twice (I overtook him while he was queuing in traffic). On both occasions, he sounded his horn repeatedly, revved his engine hard, and overtook dangerously close - if he'd misjudged it, or I'd wobbled, he would surely have hit me. I complained to the council's taxi licensing officer who said he'd do nothing unless there was a prosecution. The police/CPS won't prosecute unless a cyclist is injured, so taxi drivers can (and do) behave dangerously around cyclists they don't like without fear of any comeback.

There are a few further points I'd like to raise:

Cycle facilities are often worse than useless. The recommended width of a cycle lane is 2m; almost none that are not also bus lanes are this wide. That means that motorists overtaking at the white line (which many of them do) are passing at much less than the Rule 163 distance. Furthermore, the surface of these on-road cycle lanes is often poorer than the rest of the road, and they fill with debris from the road. I often cycle just outside these sort of lanes for these reasons. Shared-use paths for pedestrians and cycles are dangerous, for both cyclists and pedestrians; indeed there is research showing they are more dangerous to cycle on than the road proper. If you cycle much faster than walking pace, there is a risk of collision with pedestrians who meander across the shared-use path as if it were a pavement, and for all cyclists, there is a risk of collision wherever the path crosses a side-street - it seems that drivers don't expect to meet cyclists at these points, so fail to spot them. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that many cycle facilities actually make cycling more dangerous, as drivers are more likely to bully cyclists using the road if they see such a facility that the cyclist isn't using.

Accordingly, I'd like to remind drivers that cyclists are not obliged to use these facilities, and you should not shout at those that choose not to. As I say above, often the cyclist is safer on the road. More generally, though don't intimidate cyclists who you feel are delaying you. Cyclists are perfectly entitled to be on the roads, and are a vulnerable group of road users. If you feel a cyclist has made an odd decision about whether to use a cycle facility or not, whether or not to wear a helmet, or whatever, consider that they are entitled to make their own minds up about these things, and have probably given the matter more thought than you have. Shouting "helpful" comments to them is bullying.

Finally, and it shouldn't need saying, driving dangerously to intimidate or punish cyclists is immoral and illegal. Don't do it! I should be able to cycle to and from work free from people threatening to kill or maim me with their vehicles. In an ideal world, there would be effective sanctions against dangerous drivers who collide with cyclists, even if the cyclist is not seriously injured. In practice, this doesn't happen, and even when drivers kill cyclists, they not infrequently escape being charged with any offense.

So yes, remember rule 163, and give cyclists a chance!

ETA This DfT article is quite sensible.

[0] No, this isn't a joke about rules about porn on the internet

Comments

[lnr]

The difference is that they can be identified when in a car and penalised. Perhaps cyclist would get a better image if all bikes had registered owners and prominent registration plates like motorcycles, enabling easy identification and punishment of those who disobey the rules of the road.

I hope you don't mind me commenting on several things you've said, but what do you think of the fact that although Ian has identified the people involved in several incidents when his bike was damaged (sometimes severely) and he was even assaulted (and I was a witness to those handprints on his neck) and yet not *once* has the identification led to punishment.

And yet each year in Cambridge many cyclists get fixed penalty tickets handed out on the spot for pavement cycling and lack of lights.

I do think it would be good if poor cyclist behaviour could be reduced. It gives cyclists a bad name, and makes life much less pleasant on the roads for those of us who do cycle carefully and safely and within the law. But I don't think registration would make any difference.

[lnr]

The time his bike was destroyed was a case of someone driving through red lights, not road rage. He got insurance money to replace the bike, but there was no prosecution. So it's not just road rage. And when my sister was attacked by another (female) driver in a road rage incident (and had hair pulled out) after they'd both stopped at a petrol station it was prosecuted, so it's not the case that road rage assaults can't be prosecuted.

I still find it uncomfortable that you can say:

There are just a bunch of assholes out there who choose to use whatever vehicle they are using at the time as a weapon and to intimidate others, regardless of the size of the other vehicle - cars who intimidate and are inconsiderate to cyclists are just as likely to do the same to other cars, or even lorries may times their size. Similarly there are cyclists of the same mentality.

and apparently not see the inherent complete disparity in scale, both in intimidation *caused* and in intimidation *received*.

[(Anonymous)]

"How many times have you been deliberately attacked with a deadly weapon by a cyclist, threatening you with serious injury ?"

As a pedestrian? Several.

What weapon did they use ? Did they take their D-lock off its bracket and swing it at you ? Did they have a kitchen knife in their panniers ?

I suspect that actually you're referring to their bicycle, but this is ridiculous. The idea that a bike is anywhere near as threatening when used as a weapon as a car or a knife or indeed any kind of deadly weapon is absurd. Riding a bike into a pedestrian is as likely to hurt the rider as the victim. Deliberately driving a car at any speed into a pedestrian or cyclist will usually maim or kill - and if there aren't any witnesses the murderer can say the victim "stepped out" and get away scot-free!

"Cyclists kill about one person a year in Britain"

By direct collision, perhaps. How many more injuries do they cause by illegal/reckless behaviour which causes other road users to take emergency evasive action?

Firstly, this is the ridiculous and contrived scenario of the form "I had to kill the second pedestrian because the first one stepped out into the road" Do you know anyone to whom anything like this has ever happened? Do you think that these kind of circumstances make up even a tiny fraction of the 3000 deaths and 30,000 maimings a year involving to motor vehicles?

And I don't mean it "nearly" happened. I wasn't "nearly" deliberately run into and then assaulted! My bicycle wasn't "nearly" destroyed. I mean actually. If we are counting "nearly" then I am "nearly" driven into about once a week! (But I'm an experienced and careful cyclist, so with one notable exception I manage to stop or swerve and thus avoid a crash with the red light jumping drivers, and the drivers who pull out in front, and the drivers who pull out onto roundabouts "without seeing me", and so on.)


Secondly, there is a hidden bias even in your very question. Walking and cycling are inherently very low risk both to the walker or cyclist and to others. It is quite unreasonable that drivers are permitted to introduce the enormous hazards of tonnes of heavy machinery and then impose on everyone else a requirement to behave especially carefully and follow a complicated and inconvenient set of rules to try to avoid some of the resulting injuries and deaths!

When a pedestrian "steps out without looking" in town, and is killed, that is not their fault! It may be their fault in law, but this is grossly unfair. People who want to operate heavy machinery in a public place should take full responsibility for doing so safely, and should not be allowed to impose onerous conditions on everyone else.

Imagine if you were to walk through the fair on Midsummer Common right now, and there was a complicated system of pedestrian traffic lights, and areas (marked on the ground with paint or kerbstones) where you were allowed to walk and areas where you weren't allowed to walk. Imagine that if you were to obey the rules you had to make long detours, wait for a chance to proceed sometimes for minutes at a time, and if you got it wrong you were likely to be decapitated by a flying piece of machinery.

Imagine that children had to be specially trained to submit utterly to the operators of fairground equipment - to look both ways for flying ride cars, to check for cars that haven't stopped when they should have done, and implicitly told that if they don't do that they would get very badly hurt and it would be their fault.

Imagine that 3000 people a year were killed this way.

No-one would stand for it. But that's the situation every day in every town dominated by the motor vehicle. As the Transport Select Committee put it,

It is inconceivable that any transport system invented today would be accepted, no matter what its benefits, if it involved this level of carnage.

Ian Jackson

[(Anonymous)]

I wrote so with one notable exception I manage to stop or swerve and thus avoid a crash which needs clarification. I have on all but one occasion managed to avoid accidental crashes.

Unsurprisingly I have less often been able to avoid crashes where the driver is deliberately driving at me, but in these cases I have always (so far, touch wood) avoided injury, although there has been damage to my bike. Unfortunately, nowadays part of defensive cycling is managing these confrontations in a way that minimises risk of a seriously bad outcome.

For example, when being tailgated I tend to slow down gradually (while signalling clearly that the driver should keep back) and in a number of cases this has resulted in a slow speed ramming from behind. (Most recently, after the taxi driver rammed me, he got out and asked me "why were you waving me away?". Obviously I don't regard the collision as an "accident" - he deliberately disregarded my very clear signal.)

But I count that as a successful outcome compared to the alternative which would often be to allow the driver to sqeeze past without enough clearance, or make some other risky manoeuvre myself such as diving onto the pavement. I'd prefer to take a large risk of yet another trashed rear wheel than a small risk of a life-changing injury.

But why am I forced to make this choice, many times a year ? Because drivers can attack people with their vehicles with almost complete impunity.