Especially when the pro-drivinglikeadouchebag lobby is so powerful.
I realise that I may live in a different part of the UK, but I just don't get a sense that there's a 'drivinglikeadouchebag' lobby.
I've cycled almost all my life, much of it in city centres. I encourage my children to ride and find the cycling environment in the UK largely benign.
I have crashed bicycles (occasionally) through my own fault and found passers-by to be kind and helpful.
I've been walloped by cars and generally found the Police, ambulance crews and bystanders to be helpful (even the offending motorist on occasion).
There is a hugely powerful motor-industry lobby in the UK (SMMT), but it's all about selling cars, rather than being pro-car in traffic matters.
Things like the Scrappage Scheme and even year-related suffix/prefix registration plates are born of motor-industry lobbying... They are mighty and they are loud and they are clever and will stop at nothing to sell cars. They are good at it.
I don't imagine there's a cycling lobby in the UK to match it (or indeed any lobby outside the tobacco or arms industries).
But I don't know of any lobby that advocates driving like a douchebag. I'm not sure there needs to be one. There will always be those who need no lobbying to oblige. They are in a tiny minority.
Viewing some of the footage from helmetcammery, I do occasionally wonder whether some (not all) posters are getting themselves all hot and bothered in a self-justifying bubble of moral high-horsery.
I think some footage is wonderful, some entertaining and some of great benefit as a training tool. I could never condemn it.
But around the fringes there are helmetcam posters who display tendencies indicative of a
'bikes good, cars bad' mentality.
I find all that malarkey slightly creepy.
But I respect entirely the right of any cyclist to continue to entertain, guide and train us with footage that amuses or informs, even that occasional footage that that makes the poster seem slightly barmy.
