New biker - how do you deal with these situations?

zubair wrote: »

I used to be that guy. I think it's better to give a head shake and move on. I think being a good ambassador for bikers is far more beneficial than giving someone a lesture because they drifted into your lane, most of the time they probably wouldn't even know what they did wrong.

I once spotted a mate of mine stopped at the lights in his car so I pulled along side him and was gesturing towards him, non aggressively of course, and he absolutely shat his pants until he realised it was me. He's a solicitor and told me he was having images of being killed like Veronica Guerin. You don't know what people's circumstances are and bikers can already seem threatening to people. So I know you're not necessarily being aggressive but that's probably not how it's being perceived.

99% of the time, I'm all about the friendly biker image. Not pushy in traffic, friendly waves and beeps to kids who seem interested, etc.

The times I've gone down the lecture route have been people almost causing me to t-bone them by pulling out without looking, or worse, trying to get out quickly rather than waiting. One of those was a chap blindly pulling across two lanes of traffic, causing me to emergency brake and stop with a legitimate two inches or less between my wheel and his passenger side.

In those situations, I'm 100% aware of how terrifying a biker is (and I'm a fairly big guy as is) and how aggressive it is perceived, so the point IS to put the ****s up someone so that they don't do it again. It's extremely rare I do that, but I do believe it has a place.

Ive also given up on remonstrating--its energy wasted on no marks who will never learn and usually react aggressively to any suggestion of wrongdoing. The average driver doesnt care about you on a bike--my life is too short to waste my time on aggro. I just make a note to keep alert and keep looking for danger.

I've found that the more in the wrong the other driver is, the more aggressively they react (yes, women too.)

On the Dan Dan video, the first crash was due to poor line of sight didn't see car coming across the lane in a line of traffic. If he'd stood on the pegs he probably would have seen the car crossing.

Q - do you ever stand when filtering or approaching junctions with traffic queuing? - obv would need to be slow speed as wouldn't want to ram on the brakes while stood up - but moving slowly and covering the front brake, shouldn't endanger yourself, in theory should should give better views left and right (ok you don't have mirrors for what's behind but the main risk in this scenario is what might get you from left or right up ahead).

Jimmy Bottlehead wrote: »

I rarely filter between fast moving traffic.

Yep, I think most people's idea of filtering is urban traffic jams and stopped lines of traffic, the idea being to slot into a space once it starts moving normally again (as opposed to crawling 20 yards and stopping again).

zubair wrote: »

I have stood on the pegs to get a better view ahead at times but not when filtering. I might have done it before I started to filter, can't think of the scenarios but I've done it. Simple approach when filtering is to expect a pedestrian, cyclist, dog, anything, to come between two cars you're filtering past, and also remember to expect them to randomly decide to do a uturn. One very obvious one is when a car is stopped with a large gap between them and the car in front. Expect them to be letting someone out.

GS?