Cars in a Hurry

I cycled over to Harborough tonight. Quite cold, I thinks it is dropping below freezing. Anyway, I am off to the spinning class on country roads and I get overtaken by a lorry. No biggie. I am doing 30 and he is going faster. Fine. Then he slams on the anchors and takes the next junction, only 30' away.

On the way back a Bmer overtakes me, just before a series of parked cars, where he has to stop for oncoming traffic, forcing me to stop. Now if he hadn't done that, I would not have had to stop. Further down the road I had another car driver overtake me, only to slam on the anchors to turn right onto his drive.

I get the feeling that the chase instinct is in action here and that car drivers can not stand to have anything slow in front of them, even when allowing the cyclist to go in front is the most sensible, considerate action, people can not stand the thought that the might be held up, even for a second.

This is similar to other instances that I have seen while out driving. They have to beat the lorry to the roundabout, if in the right hand lane they will have to overtake, even as the two lanes become one and they are not even 1/3 of a car length within sight of clearing the car that they want to get past. So even though they are out of position, the fact that they are in the RH lane gives them the right, or some sort of imperative to force their way to the front.

We are not that long out of the treas after all are we? The technology has advanced, but we still behave as though we are chasing after the wooly mammoth. The end result of this sort of driving is usually that someone end up a casualty. Usually, it is the poor cyclist or other car driver who has got into these guys way.

I think that we need to take a step back and look at what it is that we are actually doing on the roads. Do we need this hassle in our lives? Do we need all of the agression and frayed tempers? The solution is simple. Get on your bikes. It allows you to chill out. It is healthy for you and has a very good carbon footprint.

Another point to consider is this. Harborough is only 8 miles from where I live. It only takes me 30 minutes to cycle. The same car journey takes 20 minutes and I have to pay parking. Do we really need to use cars as often as we do? I think that we have become too posesive of our cars. We instill too much of ourselves into them. But they, along with freezer food diets, are killing us through lack of exercise.

Time to chill out and leave the car in the garage once and a while.

Luck