Yesterday afternoon I set off to ride into town. On Burton Road I sat in the filter lane, waiting to turn right onto Yew Tree Lane. There was a car coming the other way and I reckoned the gap wasn’t wide enough to make it across in time. The driver pulling out of Yew Tree, on the other hand, thought they had loads of time to turn right. Without bothering to look at what was in front of them.

The car hit the pannier rack on the back of the bike, damaging the rack and mudguard enough that they needed replacing. I managed to keep from falling over, though something did whack my inner right thigh hard enough to give me a big oblong bruise. As it becomes more distinct I may be able to work out what I bashed against.

I slapped the side of the car and rather loudly berated the driver then pulled my bike out from in front of it so we could clear the junction and they could apologise and arrange to pay for any damage. Except they didn’t stop. Though it appeared they were going to pull in at first, they decided not to and just turned down the next junction and drove off. Luckily the driver behind them had taken their licence plate, so I’ve reported them to the Police. Hopefully they’ll get a fine and points for dangerous driving and/or leaving the scene of an accident, but I’m not optimistic.

Having written about my incident I would like to point out that it’s only the second time in 21 years of cycling around Manchester (and one or two other cities) that I’ve been hit by a car. I did once ride into the back of a car because I let myself get distracted by the driver who should have been behind me but was actually beside me and trying to be on top of me, but that’s something else. I’ve fallen off a few times as well, often for comedy reasons. (Ride over an empty drinks can and the ends curve in and lock around your front wheel. This can then rotates with the wheel until it hooks under your mudguard, locking the wheel and throwing you over the handlebars.) But, really, my riding career has been safe and enjoyable overall.

I’ve spent thousands of hours, and covered thousands of miles, on my bikes. I’ve saved thousands of pounds in bus fare and visited parts of the city that I wouldn’t have got to otherwise. I’ve commuted and ridden for pleasure, transported stuff and gone shopping. And, until last year when I went soft and became rain averse, bikes have provided exercise which has kept me slimmer than anyone who eats and drinks as well as I do deserves to be.

Bikes are brilliant. If only we could get those idiot drivers off our roads.

There’s something about news items featuring cycles, particularly stories with a bearing on safety, which brings out the idiots. John Paul Allen was hit and killed by a car on Liverpool Road in Eccles. Which is a tragedy in itself, so why must the morons pile on in the reports comment thread just to compound it? There’s a load of the usual rubbish- Red light jumping, riding on the pavement, etc.- cited even though nothing in the report suggests Allen was doing any of these things. Yet when someone says that perhaps the driver was to blame (statistically more likely by 3 to 1 and almost certainly the truth as revealed in other comments) one of the reactionaries gets defensive and starts frothing and complaining about being victimised.

A complaint rattled out repeatedly by some of the haters is that cyclists don’t pay Road Tax, so they don’t deserve to be on the road. Nobody pays Road Tax, it doesn’t exist. Roads are funded out of Council Tax and general taxation. Even I, currently earning so little I don’t pay any income tax, fund road building through Council Tax and duty on essential items such as beer. Demonstrating their continued incomprehension, one of the commenters suggests that even though Road Tax isn’t real he’s allowed to cite it because he thinks it’s real. Sometimes I’d like to be able to reach through my monitor and slap people.

Another thing which annoys me about reporting of fatalities on the road is the coyness about what happened- the cyclist was “in collision with a Honda Civic”. Who hit whom? “In collision with” makes it sound like the bike rode into the car, when it’s almost certainly the other way around. I understand that there may be a wish to spare the grieving family further pain (in which case why allow the nasty, anti-cycling, “he was asking for it” tone in the comments?) and the paper may not be allowed to give out details which could prejudice a future conviction. But I’d like to see blame in these accidents correctly apportioned. Occasionally it will have been the fault of the cyclist, but many, many times more it will have been the driver who made a mistake which killed another person whilst they could walk away.

As the Government’s transport policy stands to make us all, but primarily cyclists and pedestrians, less safe on the roads, we need to more loudly point out that drivers are not the victims they claim to be and they should get a sense of proportion.

Okay, the full title of the post I’m linking to is Drivers don’t think cyclists should be on the road, says DfT report, but observation shows my version is valid as well. I’ve not yet read the full report linked to in the post, but many of the points are laid out by Bikehub anyway. Drivers need to learn to share the road. Even if they don’t get out of their car and experience the freedom of riding, they could experience a health benefit if they’d just learn to stop being stressed about not making it to the next red lights a whole, ineffectual, ten seconds earlier.