Car drivers are the danger!

Talk about irony. I have been riding bikes for years and haven’t had an accident in nearly 5 years. However my daily commute takes me through Warwick. The traffic in Warwick has got so bad that filtering on my Aprilia RSVR became impossible.

So I took to the push bike and on to the new cyclepaths built by Warwick councillast summer. In the last 9 months I have knocked off my pushbike by car drivers and coach drivers more than 10 times when travelling only two miles a day.

In February of this year whilst on the cyclepath running along side the A425 (Banbury Road) I got broadsided by a car leaving a posh private school with two school kids in the car.

The driver’s excuse for parking his car on my legs and hips and leaving my head dangling in the main road facing on-coming traffic was “sorry mate I didn’t see you”.

For gods sake! I was wearing a high viz motorbike jacket, two high powered lights on the front of the bike(one flashing)and high reflective strips on my arms and chest. The driver even looked straight at me and reversed back off the cyclepath path as I approached.

Having picked myself and my bike up out of the road the car driver had left without another word. Since then I have had to undergo a very risking spinal operation to scrape out a prolapsed disc (pain factor 11 out of 10) and I wont be riding any type of bike for at least a year and possibly never.

So don’t talk to me about motorcycles being a danger to cyclists. There is only one danger to cyclists and that is four wheeled vehicle drivers.

Unfortunately it looks like I am going to be confined to being one of these idiots for the rest of my life just because one of them was more interested in getting home 5 seconds earlier than taking notice of what he saw when he looked to his left before crossing a cyclepath.

Of course the police can’t find the driver and the school has no idea who he was or who the children were in the back of the car and they flatly refuse to write to parents asking for any information.

You don’t have to be posh to be priviliged but it helps you get away with crippling someone for life.