Cycling

I really enjoy cycling to and from work, or to get from A to B to C. It feels like a strange physical expression of my feminism, particularly late at night after meetings when I'm banging along dual carriageways and "owning" the road. I generally tend to prefer cycling late at night, when there's not much traffic and today there was a perfect demonstration of why that might be.

I was heading to Asda East Street and had just made it across the river and was coming back around to head down Coronation Road. I pulled over quite far to the left to let a bus past as buses (sp?) kill cyclists. As I was coming back round from the kerb, a male cyclist passed my on the right, quite fast and quite close. I don't usually like people getting too close to me but he was so quick I didn't yell. There was a steady flow of traffic as it was about 5pm.

As the cyclist pulled past me on my right, he clearly came too far over for a car driver's preference and said driver honked his horn. The cyclist shook his fist or similar and by now both car and bike were a couple of metres ahead of me. What happened next really shocked me. The car was pulling past the cyclist and swerved towards him in such a way that if the cyclist had been near the car he would've been knocked off. There was absolutely no reason for the driver to pull over to the left and back again on straight road, with no hazards. He simply did it on purpose to "teach the cyclist" a lesson. It was terrifying.

I'm a driver as well as a cyclist, and I used to be really scared of overtaking cyclists, knocking them off and sometimes just frustrated by how bloody slow they seemed to be. But do you know what? Who cares? If you're in a car, you're going to be getting where you're going far more quickly than the cyclist, particularly in Bristol where you never seem to be more than five minutes from a bloody hill. Give cyclists space, hang back, overtake where you can. Your journey is not the priority. We're all trying to get where we're going, on overcrowded and busy roads. Some of us would like to arrive without being injured.