a few years ago i was dating a woman with a Land Cruiser. She didn't know the size of her car at all. She never went too close to the kerb or cyclists because she simply couldn't judge that side at all and totally overcompensated. The result was her driving with 2 wheels over the white line virtually all the time. Oncoming traffic would be pushed into their kerbside and i often saw drivers mouth things and put up various hand gestures to her. I told her what she was doing but she just didn't get it.
What i'm saying is that , along with lack of respect to the cyclist, there could be an element of these "Chelsea tractor" owners not having a clue to the size of their vehicle.
One time i had stopped my bike in a park while a woman tried to parallel park her Range Rover. i think she must have tried 6 or 7 times before i offered to do it for her. i jumped in and did it first time.
Agreed that on the whole, SUV vehicles being used for the school run are about the worst category for lousy driving I know. I think it is a combination of poor driving skills and sheer selfishness (I'm safe, my beautiful children are safe in here, don't give a damn if I put anyone else or their children in danger'). As I've said before, even some of the local car drivers avoid the local village schools at school run time; parents' vehicles are known for emerging from the car park (which has excellent visibility) regardless of whether there is any traffic on the road or not, and then doing the same at the first T junction. I certainly avoid the area at the relevant times when on the bike.
(We stopped getting Nissans when that ugly Quashquai came out, it's a lousy vehicle, far less boot space that its predecessor. I can't see the point of it. Nissan don'tmake a proper saloon/estate any more (and the local garage told us Nissans are no longer as reliable as they were either).
As a driver I didn't notice SUV drivers being any different then any others. Is quite amazing that as a cyclist they are up there with BMWs and white vans. I have seen youtube that mroe expensive cars are less considerate then more expensive ones. That might reflect more on some people prefering to drive expensive cars and less to do with wealth. At my workplace quite a few well of folk drive cheap cars, some even cycle on cheap steel frame bikes.
bikerwaser wrote:a few years ago i was dating a woman with a Land Cruiser. She didn't know the size of her car at all. She never went too close to the kerb or cyclists because she simply couldn't judge that side at all and totally overcompensated. The result was her driving with 2 wheels over the white line virtually all the time. Oncoming traffic would be pushed into their kerbside and i often saw drivers mouth things and put up various hand gestures to her. I told her what she was doing but she just didn't get it.
What i'm saying is that , along with lack of respect to the cyclist, there could be an element of these "Chelsea tractor" owners not having a clue to the size of their vehicle.
One time i had stopped my bike in a park while a woman tried to parallel park her Range Rover. i think she must have tried 6 or 7 times before i offered to do it for her. i jumped in and did it first time.
This is my experience too. My tiny wife is always complaining about how large cars are getting and how she cannot see the extremes of even our small family saloon. Then fashion dictates a 4x4 and you get lady drivers with no idea where the car sits on the road at all. So mostly I think it's just a spatial awareness problem.
However I did encounter lady in 4X4 on narrow lane who wouldn't move over to let my bicycle pass because she said that if she moved over she'd get the wheels muddy!!!!
Stradageek wrote:However I did encounter lady in 4X4 on narrow lane who wouldn't move over to let my bicycle pass because she said that if she moved over she'd get the wheels muddy!!!!
"Let's see who rusts first"
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way.No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse. There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Living in a very rural area, most 4x4s are driven by folks who really need them to get about in the winter (including Me!), and most drive considerately. We don't see too many toy 4x4s, aka SUVs My worst experiences come at weekends when folks come out for "a drive in the country" and haven't a clue how to behave on rural roads. After all, how can you tell where to drive if there is no kerb or central white line? They are the same ones who crawl down the main dale road at 25mph and only speed up when they go past the 30mph sign into a village. Incidentally, the visibility for the driver from a traditional LR Defender is a lot better than from most modern cars - it has proper "corners" that you can see. But of course that all has to change in the interests of safety, according to the EU or somesuch.
Next time you are in a car park, just take note of the Chelsea Tractor attempts to park! That gives you an insight into why they pass so close - they have no idea of the width or the length of their cars!
blackbike wrote:I find it odd that 4x4 drivers who lumber towards me on narrow country lanes never want to pull over on to muddy verges so I can get past.
Like other drivers they expect me to get out of their way and get just as annoyed when I don't.
Why don't they use the off-road capabilities of their pride and joy?
Richard D Congrats for managing to include,no less than three times,that beautiful word 'wazzock''* into your post
*The Lancashire spelling is 'wazzack' . Which is similar to 'wazzum'(worm) which was used extensively when fishing when I wer uh lad. Shouting up the canal bank to a fellow angler and friend the words ''hast any wazzums,a'll swap thee fer some mags*''
*maggots.
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"All we are not stares back at what we are"
W H Auden
Isn't this something to do with the increasing width of cars generally (especially SUVs), coupled with habits ingrained from the time you first learned to drive. Nearside clearance is something which a learner finds difficult to master: but once learned, it becomes one of those instinctive 'feel' aspects of driving, so that few people regularly check their nearside mirror. The trouble is that the acquired 'feel' is the one that was right for your first car: and older drivers in particular are sticking with that, and aren't conscious of the need to adapt to the markedly increased width. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
Last edited by ChrisButch on 21 Mar 2015, 12:53pm, edited 1 time in total.