Hey, I might as well continue (knowing full well I've joined with a fairly contentious first post). There are a huge amount of column inches given to fighting the cyclists cause in London - particularly from the Evening Standard, so it's not a case of total persecution by the media. If anything, the balance is probably pro-cyclist.
I'm not saying that people don't do daft things or have bad attitudes in motor vehicles like User highlights, although I can honestly say that since biking in town I haven't seen much dodgy driving - one instance of a chauffeur driving within a mm of me and a couple of dozy buses, but that's it. Plenty of pedestrians hop off the pavements onto cycle lanes though, but actually it's pretty easy to see which ones are going to do that in most cases. I'm just resigned to it, I slow down, watch them step in front of me and then they're usually fairly apologetic. I gain seconds on my journey, but we're all smiles and everything is ok. Every day I see cyclists making a big deal of it and being really aggressive to the pedestrians - I even saw a fight two weeks ago because of what the cyclist called the pedestrian. It just depresses me a bit, because it's hard to be righteous when there's so much iffy behaviour from cyclists. More examples: lots of buses will pull in at stops along my route. I see them start to indicate, so I slow and let them pull in. I'll then have three cyclists, overtake me and then swerve left to nip in and undertake the bus, so it can't pull over at the stop. That's just plain inconsiderate and also dangerous. But it happens every day and multiple times along the route. I know people on here will have a million horror stories about drivers etc and I'm not dismissing them - all those kinds of situations shouldn't happen. I just think that London cyclists in general have a poor attitude, very poor road sense and a blinkered view of how they should be treated on the road.
Honestly not trying to flame the thread!
