Anyone else notice how much more aggressive and entitled people become the moment they get behind the wheel in London?
I say this as someone who drives and cycles around London.
Today I was cycling in Chiswick when an older woman in a Mercedes SUV started aggressively blasting her horn at me at a turn to squeeze past.
Not because I was blocking the road. Not because there was some emergency. She just wanted to get past me right now.
So she squeezes past, gets about 2 metres ahead of me… and immediately sits in traffic.
That was it.
She had risked my life, blasted a horn inches away from me, waved her hands around and driven aggressively around a vulnerable road user to gain approximately two metres before joining the exact same queue of traffic. What is going through someone's head at that moment?
And the horn really gets me. A car horn is supposed to be a safety device. It's there to warn someone of your presence or prevent an imminent danger. It isn't supposed to be a button you repeatedly mash because you're annoyed that a cyclist exists in front of you.
And blasting a horn from close range at a cyclist is genuinely disorientating. You're insulated inside a car, looking over the steering wheel. I'm exposed to the road, and suddenly there's an enormous blast of sound right next to my head while you're simultaneously trying to squeeze past me.
Then you see the hand gestures. The shaking of the head. The furious facial expressions.
All because you had to wait behind a bicycle for a few seconds.
I've become much more sympathetic to cyclists since cycling regularly myself. I actually think I'm a fairly considerate driver and the more time I spend on a bike, the more I've realised that drivers are overwhelmingly the source of danger on the road.
I'm not saying cyclists are perfect. We're not. There are plenty of idiots on bikes too.
But there is an enormous difference between a cyclist doing something annoying and a driver doing something annoying when one of them is sitting inside a 2-tonne vehicle.
London is also, frankly, an incredibly easy city to cycle around for a huge proportion of journeys. It's relatively compact, fairly flat in most places, and the cycling infrastructure is actually pretty decent in many parts of the city now. You don't need to be some Lycra-clad athlete doing 100-mile rides. For a lot of journeys, an ordinary person on an ordinary bike could get there perfectly easily.
I don't hate cars. I own and drive one.
I just think something about being behind a windscreen makes people forget that the person they're trying to squeeze past is an actual human being.
And honestly, seeing someone who has presumably lived a long life still behaving like that behind the wheel of an enormous SUV is particularly depressing.
If you're willing to risk seriously injuring someone because waiting 20 seconds feels intolerable, maybe the problem isn't the cyclist.