Interesting door zone attitude

[As Easy As Riding A Bike]

Yesterday evening I was cycling along this piece of road, in weather rather worse than this lovely streetview picture -

As usual, I am giving the vehicles parked in the bays on my left a wide berth, for obvious reasons. As I approach the junction (behind the white van parked on the left), a silver Mercedes moves alongside me, completing his overtake just before the van.

As I pull up alongside him at the junction, virtually simultaneously (he's going right, I'm going left) I tell him his overtake was rather pointless - "Come on, that was completely pointless. Pointless" - were my exact words.

He winds down his window, and responds to the effect that I was "pedalling too fast" (hence the resultant proximity to the junction of the overtake - presumably if I had been stationary, there would not have been a problem) and that I was "all over the road".

I explained to him why I was positioned as I was - namely, the door zone. He knew what this was - or at least, seemed to - but he didn't think I was justified in cycling where I was, because, in his words,

"noone was opening any car doors along there."

I don't think he gets it.

 

[DrSquirrel]

His comment is funny, cadence doesn't matter of course we know - even if he did say "you were going to fast" he still fails.

Manovres like that he would have failed a test with a major easily.

The design does look bad, parking before a bend/junction with hardly any space to drive up the road even if its clear.

Doesn't matter if there is a door zone or not really, poor place to overtake.

 

[Simba]

He is in a German car, of course he must be right. I will never cycling anywhere near the door zone after I was car doored last year and broke my collar bone.

 

[As Easy As Riding A Bike]

The design does look bad, parking before a bend/junction with hardly any space to drive up the road even if its clear.

Doesn't matter if there is a door zone or not really, poor place to overtake.

The parking bays do tend to put people completely on the wrong side of the road, right on an approach to the junction, risking a head-on with traffic turning into the road off the gyratory.

Overtaking a cyclist there makes the situation even worse.

 

[summerdays]

I was thinking about it the other day (can't remember if I was in a car or on the bike at the time) and I thought ... well cars don't drive that close to the cars unless they have to pass other traffic - and wondering how non-cycling motorists would justify that.