Obviously Not A UK Bus Driver
This via cyclelicio.us:
You can read the full story and the excerpt from the police blog over on Cyclelicio.us, but to summarise:
- A driver rear-ends a cyclist
- He tries to leave the scene
- A bus driver who’s seen the crash in his rear-view mirror blocks the road to prevent the driver’s escape
Big hat-tip to that bus driver.
In general, bus drivers are among the best on British roads - they undergo extensive training, carry passengers who are usually quite vocal about mistakes, and work for companies who mostly understand the problems of bad PR.
Unfortunately, they’re also operating to a timetable, and there’s nothing like the pressure of time to make good people do bad things:
In general, I don’t think that bus drivers pass any closer than car drivers. The problem is that the sheer physical size of a bus looming over you is deeply intimidating. Couple that with driver impatience and overtaking moves that would normally be unsafe end up feeling bloody dangerous.
Oh, and just in case you were thinking this was all one sided… this whole impatience thing cuts both ways. Remember this one?
It has to be asked, what sort of idiot designs or recommends “bus/bike lanes”. The examples from Britain show what always happens - buses want to keep overtaking the same bikes, and keep pulling to the left for stops. Meanwhile, cyclists want to continue in a straight line without stopping and starting. The two modes are fundamentally incompatible.
But there are some bus companies which are trying to do something about it, just as this from LRT, while we are waiting for better infrastructure…
I didn’t watch all the bad bus videos, I find them just too unpleasant. But I did watch the suicidal cyclist video. It’s sometimes hard to estimate the width of gaps on videos, because of the different focal lengths, but the gap the cyclist was going for looked impossibly narrow. It was sheer madness to even consider going for it. Maybe it’s decades of cycling that would make me look for somewhere else or hit the brakes.
I really didn’t like the cycle lane carefully located in the door-zone in the Glasgow video [Magnatom?].
Otherwise as David Hembrow says.