Interlude - cue music

Just a quick post to muse of some of the abnormal characters you see when riding to work that you might miss (or in this case hit) when driving in a car.

For those of you not from Canberra, there is one major road that accounts for about one third of my commute. It is essentially a freeway, since all of the cross streets go either under or over the road with various on ramps and off ramps. I am talking about Adelaide avenue. It is about 5 km long and has an on-road cycle lane built into the widened shoulder.

The cycle lane is very smooth and although you could cover the same ground on bike paths, they tend to meander around a bit and have lots of tree roots growing right under them, making them quite bumpy. Making Adelaide avenue less attractive is the fact that it is the main road connecting South Canberra with the parliamentary triangle so the traffic is quite heavy. In its favour is the fact that on any morning while driving I would pass 10 - 15 cyclists so most motorists on the road would be used to them, making them more cyclist aware, in theory.

So, riding along the shoulder is nice, until you get to an on or off ramp. Here is how it works:

• On the off ramps, the cars have to give way to the cyclist. There is a green painted lane on the road that the cyclist ride in if they are going straight on, passing the off ramp. Cars have to wait until the bike clears this before exiting. Once I had a car pacing behind me a 30 kph waiting for me to clear it to exit. Once it did, the car behind it decided to have a swerve at me on the way past since I had delayed his trip to work by 15 seconds
• On the on ramps, the cyclists have to give way to the cars entering the road. This usually means looking over your left shoulder for cars coming down or up the ramp and timing it through gaps in the traffic. Worst case is that you have to stop, but they have put little poles there for you to hold on to while you wait

Anyway, all that background to tell you about this idiot. Somehow he had over taken me on a downhill section and as I was approaching the next on ramp he was a few metres ahead of me. There was one car on the ramp approaching and I could tell if I slowed a bit I could time it perfectly to cross right behind it and so could the tool in front of me. Well he must have had a kevlar suit on since instead of waiting, he just stuck his left arm out to signal and just pulled across the lane in front of the car which had to jam on it brakes. As it passed him it have him a good swerve just for good measure (who knows what these swerving drivers would do if they miscalculated and hit someone while performing this manoeuvre? Would they tell the cops that they were only trying to scare the person on the bike?).

Anyway I couldn't believe my eyes. I yelled out "You idiot! You are supposed to give way to them!". The next little bit after the on ramp was an uphill so I caught up to him and noticed he had headphones on so wouldn't have heard my rant. He said something to me, but I had headphones on and didn't hear. I just looked at him and said "Idiot!" and rode past.