Hyde Park Commute video

[Wendy]

Here's the video:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/sWp4SQYaEsU&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/sWp4SQYaEsU&rel=1</a>

And here's a message I got on youtube, for your amusement!

If I was a driver encountering you, I think I'd find you rather irritating. All that squeezing in between traffic is dangerous, not to mention rude. In most of those situations, your options were either to stay in line with the traffic or dismount your bike and walk it on the pavement.

I ride in heavy traffic every day. For me, the rule of thumb is simple: if there are vehicles in ALL of the lanes before me, I wait; I only overtake if there's a clear lane, giving me a clear opportunity to do so.

[handcyclist]

 

I think I encountered your respondent in London sometime ago.

I was filtering on my m/c, slowly and safely. I stopped at a red, put my foot down, and ten seconds later a prize prat in a car ran over it, and stopped with a wheel still trapping my boot. I shouted at him to drive off it, which he did. It was no accident, he wasn't surprised by my shout. When I challenged him about it, he said "Squeezing through traffic like that is not fair and very rude".

Words failed me. I had bruising for weeks.

[Dave]

Hmm. I'm not too sure about the bit when you rode between the bus and the van (especially as the bus was indicating right), but - your call.

On the issue of the general principle, sliding through traffic is one of the best bits about riding in cities 

[Wendy]

Hmm. I'm not too sure about the bit when you rode between the bus and the van (especially as it was indicating right), but - your call.

On the issue of the general principle, sliding through traffic is one of the best bits about riding in cities 

Yeah, Nutty mentioned it before.  What's not evident on the video is that I could see the bus couldn't go anywhere, and I was watching his front wheel as I went past.

[TimO]

To be fair, the image on these cameras can make it look much hairier than it actually is.  On my commute video (shuffles around on YouTube... aha here), sometimes the traffic and pedestrians seem rather too close, when I know I was clear of them by quite a large margin.

(ps, you need to use the [noembed] / [/noembed] tags to stop the auto-conversion of a YouTube URL into an embedded picture!)

[Wendy]

Yes, side-side distance seems more than it is in reality, and you appear much closer to objects in front of the camera than in reality.

[rogerzilla]

Rather low rpm - but that's normal for 'bent riding, isn't it?  So you can use your back muscles.

[Wendy]

Rather low rpm - but that's normal for 'bent riding, isn't it?  So you can use your back muscles.

Only because I was relaxing and going slowly, otherwise I tend to sit at 100 or above.  I don't think low rpm is usual on 'bents, and it might even be dangerous to your knees, considering how much more force you can put through the pedals.