By that logic, nobody can ever drive in towns/cities where multiple lanes are all going the same way.
How are you reasoning that?
Those lanes are designed so that it should be safe for traffic in each lane to travel forwards independently of traffic in the lanes either side of them.
Whether that traffic is trucks or bicycles, or anything in between is irrelevant.
No, it's very relevant. Those lanes are designed so it should be safe for SOME traffic. We know that there are many lanes which are too narrow for use by larger vehicles. Sometimes there are even signs reminding drivers of large vehicles to straddle lanes.
Good practice when overtaking normally is to give at least 1.5m distance between you and whatever you are overtaking (regardless of whether it is a cyclist or another motorist). But that really doesn't apply when there are multiple lanes in low speed limit areas such as that. If it did, then no traffic could ever move faster than the slowest vehicle on that road.
So what's the problem with that? There's no God-given right to drive at the speed limit all the time and it's a 20mph road anyway, so there won't be a big speed difference between fastest and slowest. Plus, not all vehicles are so wide that they cannot leave 1.5m gap and even the wider ones could overtake when there's gaps in the oncoming traffic.
I wouldn't actually even call it "overtaking" when it is that sort of urban situation with multiple lanes full of traffic moving at different speeds.
So what would you call it? Drag racing?
I really don't think the trucker did anything wrong there. He stayed entirely within his own lane, and was only passing the cyclists slowly. The cyclists weren't doing anything wrong either, as they were also entirely within their own lane.
But any "blame" for the gap being less than 1.5m rests equally on both IMO - but mainly on the road designers who made lanes so narrow that large vehicles CANNOT leave a 1.5m gap to the edge of their lane.
Yes, the road designers share some responsibility for producing a trap of a layout, probably under pressure from politicians who spent decades pushing to maximise throughput at the expense of everything including lives, but I feel that the silly trucker had two options more than the cyclists to avoid the danger: wait until it was possible to steer wider; or not overtake. From the looks of them, the cyclists could not really speed up to 20mph to make overtaking unnecessary and legally impossible; and riding narrower only works up to a point (once singled out and in secondary, they couldn't go narrower safely) and would be against current advice anyway.
