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I cycle into work most days. Two of the things I like least are cars forming extra lanes at junctions, roundabouts and when waiting in traffic (they pull up alongside you as if to form a magic extra lane) and having queues of cars behind me. Generally I can avoid the first issue by making sure my bike is in the middle of the road when I come up to a junction, roundabout or queue but until I become as fast as Bradley Wiggins I think I’m stuck with the second.
What surprises me is the number of cyclists that will weave around a queue of 3 or 4 cars to get to the front in the junction/roundabout/traffic situations only to stop at the front. Surely this just means you now have a queue of cars behind you who have to overtake you for a second time and all you’ve done is save a couple of seconds (I see how it makes sense if you can carry on without losing momentum). Some cyclists will even form the magic extra lane which just seems dangerous as car drivers won’t expect you to be there.
As I seem to be one of a small minority I assume I’m missing out on something??
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Yes, getting hit by cars moving off as the drivers don’t notice you threading your way through the traffic 🙁 So far as I can see, this is almost as suicidal as “undertaking” the traffic; especially when going alongside a lorry that turns, when the term “undertaking” becomes horribly apt.
Quite apart from the danger, there is also the aspects of annoying the drivers being” threaded past”, some of whom will put the behaviour in the same category as being carved up by a “boy racer”, and also reducing the credibility of cyclists as “proper road users”. There are enough drivers who regard cyclists as pests, so why provide them with a justification?
Cheers
Kev -
I agree that filtering past stationary traffic is a potentially risky manoeuvre, so it should be done with caution. Surely it is a matter of judgement? If there are 20 cars queued up at the Rowstock roundabout on the way home, most of them probably going left to Wantage but failing to indicate while I want to go straight on, I am not going to wait behind them all. On the other hand if there are only 1 or 2 cars waiting I will wait behind them. Somewhere between 2 and 20 I’ll decide on the basis of the road conditions. The aim is to get back into the flow so that you are noticed by the drivers behind, ideally slotting in to a sufficiently large gap between cars near the head of the queue while the cars both sides of the gap are stationary and not just about to pull away. indeed, Advanced Stop Lines for cyclists at junctions are designing precisely such a gap into the road layout in the limiting case where there is no car ahead of the gap.
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Well said, Richard. That fits in well with the official DfT advice as taught as part of the recently-revised National Standard for Cycle Training at Level 3.
See section 4 “Passing Queueing Traffic” here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/9191/nsct-level-three.pdf
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