So your local club think you're a bit of a liability, you get a fair bit of criticism from people on here and probably elsewhere. See a pattern emerging?
On my local CC's club runs, you are part of the bunch so you ride appropriately. If you behaved like that with us, you'd get told to knock it off. If you ride like a dick, expect to told you're behaving like one.
Tony.
To be honest, I'm more inclined to think that these club members are the sort of people who cut up cyclists in their cars and proclaim the infamous BS, 'But I'm a cyclist, too!'
I mean, how do we know that they
know what they're doing, and aren't just going on what they
feel?
For most people, the gut instinct whilst riding is to give priority to cars and let them have their way with you, because you're scared of what might happen if you don't. That would make sense if cars were raging bears, and not humans controlling steel machines. As that's
not the case, safe cycling often means going against intuition and our 'gut instincts'.
Those club members may well have been riding for longer than I, or even my parents, have been
living, but if they spent their whole lives wearing their sidewalls out on the kerb, then they're always going to see vehicular cycling as reckless and provocative.
Just like the faces of shock and horror you get every time some randomer finds out you cycled more than 2 miles in one day.
On each of the few club rides that I've gone on, it was pretty obvious that no-one had done any sort of cycle training, or even just read up a bit on best practices. In one case, we had an odd situation where one side of the peloton was on a shared path and the other side was on the road. There was heavy oncoming traffic and absolutely no room for a safe overtake, and yet the riders on the road seemed all too happy to ride perhaps a foot from the pavement (if I'm generous). We had a caravan deliberately rush past giving us only a few inches, with the driver leaning on the horn the whole way. A skilled cyclist wouldn't have given them the room.
The riding here was far from perfect, of course, but taking primary at a pinch point or getting stuck on the road is not something a skilled cyclist should take offence to. I outright refuse to assume that club riders are some sort of authority just by way of being older or longer standing in the club.
Driving was terrible, too. People in this thread are acting like the driver saw Matthew coming and somehow knew him, and took their anger out on him because of his YouTube channel. They didn't - this was just any old cyclist to them. The driver didn't pre-empt Matthew's gesturing and pass him close in advance, either.
