We have, unfortunately, seen plenty of examples (and lost at least one respected CCer) of riders not accepting the judgement of other viewers during the post-mortems which videos receive when they are posted.
Cameras + YouTube + Google - using the power
- Thread starter BentMikey
- Start date
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growingvegetables
Guru
- Location
- Leeds
Simple observation - aye, and that is only of my own experience over the last 12 years.
lukesdad - you don't like cameras. That's fine by me - I have no problem with that. Entirely and completely your choice.
It's different from my choice
- once, and not that long ago, I'd have a bowel-turning moment caused by the driver of a motor vehicle, something I consider sufficiently and objectively dangerous enough to report to the police, perhaps once in 6 months, maybe twice;
- but in the last six months of British Summer Time, I had 15 or more. Plain fact - incidents are more common, and seriously concerning incidents are more common, in my experience. Absolutely nothing to do with cyclists with cameras - for goodness' sake, there's not that many active cyclist-cammers in Leeds!
mr_hippo
Living Legend & Old Fart
Whilst agreeing that cameras can be used for education, one has to remember that education is a two way street. There is at least one impressionable young man who seems to be influenced more by the cyclons on this site and not the cyclists.
Now i am going to open a big can of worms and please take off your rose tinted glasses.
Do you remember the now infamous tanker/roundabout video? What did you see? Did anyone notice the big signpost that shown a diagram of the roundabout? Did you notice that another road joined the roundabout to the left of the one the cyclists was on and at roughly the same point? Did you notice what was on the road to the left? You could not -there were buildings in the way.
Cyclist sees no approaching traffic and none on the roundabout so he assumes it is safe to proceed and guess what the tanker driver sees - the same thing and does the same thing.
ln my, never too humble, opinion both parties were equally at fault.
We are vulnerable road users - in a car the fragile body is protected by steel but on a bike the fragile body protects the steel. No quips about my bike is carbon etc,, please. Does it matter if we slow down a bit to let a driver out or move to the left to allow a car to pass?
Now i am going to open a big can of worms and please take off your rose tinted glasses.
Do you remember the now infamous tanker/roundabout video? What did you see? Did anyone notice the big signpost that shown a diagram of the roundabout? Did you notice that another road joined the roundabout to the left of the one the cyclists was on and at roughly the same point? Did you notice what was on the road to the left? You could not -there were buildings in the way.
Cyclist sees no approaching traffic and none on the roundabout so he assumes it is safe to proceed and guess what the tanker driver sees - the same thing and does the same thing.
ln my, never too humble, opinion both parties were equally at fault.
We are vulnerable road users - in a car the fragile body is protected by steel but on a bike the fragile body protects the steel. No quips about my bike is carbon etc,, please. Does it matter if we slow down a bit to let a driver out or move to the left to allow a car to pass?
mr_hippo
Living Legend & Old Fart
What part of Please continue to post examples of your poor cycling on youtube but try to review them from a third pary point of view and learn from your mistakes do you not understand?
Except of course that there was no building obscuring the view and the police charged the driver with dangerous driving.
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fqACT1jNV0
Your example there encapsulates the wrongness that cycling camera haters fail to address in themselves. That their judgements are often as wrong if not more so than the cyclists posting the video. And yet they so often (as demonstrated on this thread) don't back down and just hurl abuse around instead.
If Norm is referring to Magnatom above's leaving, I'd say his departure was more based around the amount of abuse and harassment he received from users here (the style of which you can see from some of the posts on this thread) than fair and constructive criticism. While he would often be highly defensive of his position I'd say he was generally found to be in the right by those who's opinions actually matter e.g. the police.
There's also a serious amount of victim blaming that goes on in such comments - because the rider COULD have done something to avoid the incident, somehow the incident is states as being THEIR fault. Whilst it's useful to learn to protect oneselves, to state it's their fault and not the driver who hit them or whatever because they potentially could have anticapted it is akin to (excuse the hyperbole) people saying women wearing short skirts were 'asking for it', and it's pretty disgusting.
MrHappyCyclist
Riding the Devil's HIghway
- Location
- Bolton, England
Oops, sorry, I misread what you had written and thought you were actually offering to do something constructive like offering impartial advice to individuals who may benefit from it - my mistake.
So, to your brilliant idea of using videos to learn from, I'm afraid it's already been thought of. Many of us do use videos to help us improve our technique - both our own and other people's. Even those whose cycling could be improved have been quite useful, for example I've found SonOfTheWinds's videos very instructive in illustrating how important it is to adopt an assertive position in traffic to prevent idiotic drivers doing stupid, dangerous things. In fact, I posted some time ago a list of my own reasons for taking and posting videos. Here it is again:
- Learning – I have found it very useful to look back at incidents and see whether I can learn from them. I have also found it very useful to look at other people’s incidents and learn from them. I have also found it useful to get feedback on my own video clips from other experienced cyclists and learn from them. (Actually, it turns out that this has been by far the most valuable aspect.)
- Retribution – yes, it feels good to be able to name and shame drivers who do bad things to me. (And to show some idiotic things cyclists do as well.)
- Evidence – the way our laws work makes it very difficult to claim redress if needed. I have never had to do that, thank goodness, but it would help if needed. (See the lawyer’s comments in this One Show clip.) (This was my original reason for getting a camera.)
- Improving the situation – (admittedly in a very small way) I know of a number of cases of cyclists using video evidence to show the employers of appalling commercial drivers what their staff are doing. This often results in drivers undergoing additional training, often compulsory.
- Behaviour modification – there are people who claim that the presence of a video camera has the effect of improving the behaviour of drivers. I don’t really know whether this is true, but it seems plausible.
Or to put it in the rather more succinct way that the young folk tend to use nowadays: We can learn from our videos? No shoot Sherlock!
If you could edit your post to correctly ascribe your quote, we could then deal with the second part of your point.
Done. No idea how that happened ... maybe multiquoted and editing went weird.
Origamist
Legendary Member
Happy New Year mr_hippo and fellow CC commuters.
We are indeed vulnerable road users and eduation is cetainly a two way street... I remember when you posted a clip of yourself undertaking a coach and a few CCers criticised you for it. Whilst you defended your actions stoutly as I recall, I still have no doubt that some "cyclists" might view you as a "cyclon".
mr_hippo
Living Legend & Old Fart
So if a cyclist sees an incident unfolding and can do something about it but choses not to avoid it then who is at fault? If a cyclist can avoid an incident but choses not to, how can you blame the driver?
Origamist
Legendary Member
...scoring.
More seriously, commuting is not a distinguished debating chamber (sorry to shatter the illusions of maybe one newbie CycleChatter); reasoned and rational debate was dispensed with years ago in favour of bile, pettiness, one-upmanship and discourtesy.
There is the occasional glimmer of enlightenment and comedy here, but recidivist old lags like me, too long inured to fighting with shitty sticks, should be deracinated by Admin sooner rather than later (the night of the long chain-whips, perhaps). If not, just get rid of commuting altogether.
MrHappyCyclist
Riding the Devil's HIghway
- Location
- Bolton, England
So, to return to the original purpose of the thread. I think the potential that this combination of technologies provides is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio when using the available video clips for some particular purpose amongst the many different reasons that people had for posting them.
One such purpose is highlighting bad driving in an attempt to get some kind of change that might eventually improve the lot of cyclists on the road. There seem to be (at least) two potential ways to select videos for this purpose: repeat offenders (or at least vehicles that appear in more than one video), and selection based on the seriousness of the incident.
The "repeat offenders" one is probably a non-starter given the relatively small number of cyclists who post videos. I spent a bit of time playing with the YouTube API and wrote a program that extracts registration numbers from the titles of all videos on a particular channel, does a search of YouTube for any other videos with the same registration number in the title, and then lists them under the registration number. I was not surprised to see that there are very few repeat offenders turned up, even for some of the London commuters' channels - Mikey and Gaz for example. (I had fun writing it, though.)
So that leaves the seriousness of the incident as a basis for selection. There are many videos that, whilst showing behaviour that undoubtedly causes increased risk to the cyclist, are subject to debate even among cyclists as to whether the behaviour was sufficiently dangerous to warrant highlighting. (You only need to look at this topic for proof of that assertion.) It seems to me that the best approach, then, is to "pick the low hanging fruit" and concentrate on videos showing incidents that leave little or nothing open to argument regarding whether the driver's behaviour was dangerous. (I know, there will always be some 'ard man who claims that a truck screaming past at 40mph three inches from their elbow is nothing to make a fuss of, but I think we can just ignore them.)
Earlier, I suggested that some standard for tagging videos might be useful to aid in this, and I do think that might serve a purpose if enough people starting tagging according to the standard. However, it seems like that may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut; I've been involved in standards-making in the past and getting agreement on even the most trivial detail can be a right pain.
So, for those that are interested, why don't we just each share links to a small number of videos that we think are extreme examples and make a page of them? No fancy searches, just people. If anyone doesn't want to join in, then they are quite free to remain silent.
One such purpose is highlighting bad driving in an attempt to get some kind of change that might eventually improve the lot of cyclists on the road. There seem to be (at least) two potential ways to select videos for this purpose: repeat offenders (or at least vehicles that appear in more than one video), and selection based on the seriousness of the incident.
The "repeat offenders" one is probably a non-starter given the relatively small number of cyclists who post videos. I spent a bit of time playing with the YouTube API and wrote a program that extracts registration numbers from the titles of all videos on a particular channel, does a search of YouTube for any other videos with the same registration number in the title, and then lists them under the registration number. I was not surprised to see that there are very few repeat offenders turned up, even for some of the London commuters' channels - Mikey and Gaz for example. (I had fun writing it, though.)
So that leaves the seriousness of the incident as a basis for selection. There are many videos that, whilst showing behaviour that undoubtedly causes increased risk to the cyclist, are subject to debate even among cyclists as to whether the behaviour was sufficiently dangerous to warrant highlighting. (You only need to look at this topic for proof of that assertion.) It seems to me that the best approach, then, is to "pick the low hanging fruit" and concentrate on videos showing incidents that leave little or nothing open to argument regarding whether the driver's behaviour was dangerous. (I know, there will always be some 'ard man who claims that a truck screaming past at 40mph three inches from their elbow is nothing to make a fuss of, but I think we can just ignore them.)
Earlier, I suggested that some standard for tagging videos might be useful to aid in this, and I do think that might serve a purpose if enough people starting tagging according to the standard. However, it seems like that may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut; I've been involved in standards-making in the past and getting agreement on even the most trivial detail can be a right pain.
So, for those that are interested, why don't we just each share links to a small number of videos that we think are extreme examples and make a page of them? No fancy searches, just people. If anyone doesn't want to join in, then they are quite free to remain silent.
