I wish I had my dashcam on yesterday - similar to your image someone overtook me to attempt to turn left. Even before the rules change you’re not supposed to overtake someone immediately before performing a manoeuvre.
Oh there is so much stupid in that statement.
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Mikey’s a friend of mine so I just pinged him to let him know he got Boinged by Mark. To those of you who think he’s being an asshole (in London, we prefer to spell it ‘arsehole’) I have this to say: The thing that stops people breaking the law isn’t the severity of the penalty, it’s the certainty of getting caught.
Thanks to years of austerity, the Metropolitan Police barely have the resources to investigate and prosecute serious criminality. Road traffic offences are rarely pursued with the thoroughness that is required to persuade people to change their behaviour and that’s lead to some awful driving standards and absolutely preventable statistics on people being killed and seriously injured.
Knowing that your poor driving might be captured on film by Mikey and those like him is a fantastic way to motivate drivers to think twice before reaching for that phone or going through that no entry sign and although it’s kind of like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, I’m with Mikey - people need to be shown that driving like a dick is Not Okay.
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I had a little side project in mind, as a way of teaching my car to drive: teach it first to identify correct vs. illegal driving behaviour around it, then actively prepare on-line “Road Watch” reports with video attached. 
I’m (thankfully) not commuting an hour to work and back each day, but I could probably get ten or twenty infractions reported that way on a typical trip.
It would probably also pay to continue to drive an utterly boring and inconspicuous car…
Why? Leaving aside the speeding bit for the moment, fiatrn is just describing Idaho-style stopping. That is not only more convenient for cyclists, but safer in many circumstances than strictly following the (designed-for-cars) rules. It’s certainly morally justifiable, even if most of the country is still too backwards (and politically dominated by automobile interests) to have caught up to Idaho and the handful of other jurisdictions that have codified the practice into law.
As to the speeding, it really depends on how much we’re talking about. Speed limits, like a lot of other rules and aspects of road design in the US, aren’t necessarily particularly well suited even for the cars they’re targeted at, nevermind bicycles. If fiatrn is talking about occasionally managing to hit 27 mph downhill in a 25 zone or something, I find it hard to get all that worked up about it.
That said, braking distances are generally longer for bicycles, and there have been fatal pedestrian collisions arising from exactly that setup (very high speeds coming off a downhill). Be careful out there.
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I don’t know where you are, but in England & Wales there isn’t a speed limit for bicycles*. Roughly speaking, if there was a speed limit on a bike then the bike would need an accurate speedometer, and that’s a ridiculous requirement for most bicycles.
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Some, in fact many, American cities have speeding cameras as well.
Is there any standardisation on threshold for triggering a camera in the USA? It’s down to the local police force here, but it tends to be 10% + 2 MPH, so a camera in a 30 MPH zone would trigger at 35 MPH.
If you can get the laws changed, fine. Until then, it’s just temptation for car drivers or bicycle riders to make up their own justifications. “They’re breaking the law, so why not me?”
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Which is exactly what people should do with unjust and dangerous laws.
Correct, but let’s bring this back to the original discussion. How do we urge auto drivers to obey the law so folks like Mike van Erp don’t feel it necessary to shame them on social media?
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“How do we urge auto drivers to obey the law”
having me stop my bike at a 4 way stop halfway up a hill at 3am on my cummute is not the way to make drivers behave better.
@jimr1603 - the road speed limits in Denver are 25 on the little roads, but about to become 20mph in a well meaning campaign to decrease pedestrian deaths. The bike paths in Denver have a 15mph posted speed limit. I only know one person who was ‘spoken to’ about speeding on a bike path, but technically there is a limit.
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Well, yeah, when you publicly proclaim that you break the law and don’t seem to care, bad drivers will see that as a justification to do it too.
You can’t go around thinking “Okay for me, but not for thee.” is a suitable rationale, because it simply mirrors false automotive entitlement.
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It’s a good thing that’s not the rationale, then.
The driver of the car that swerves or stops suddenly because they haven’t judged you as a potential risk and then strikes (or is struck by) another road user.
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Insert gif of Mr. Bean flipping off traffic, but on a bicycle instead of sitting atop a convertible. /s
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Every one of them has the potential for harm.
Obey the rules, don’t be a dick.
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This, 1000 times this.
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