One of my significant last run-ins with a driver was summer 2023. I was turning right into a small side road that has an odd little grass triangle in the middle of the junction, as if it’s going to be a slip road when it grows up. As I turned in, a van driver, confused by the triangle, drove down the wrong side of the road and knocked me off.
I landed on a soft bit of verge. He stopped. I got up. He said, “I’m very sorry – are you all right?” I said I was. He asked after my bike, which was also fine. We had a look at his van, it was unmarked.
We agreed it was a lovely day for a ride, and he said he hoped he hadn’t spoiled it. I told him that he hadn’t.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll head on, if that’s OK. It was really nice to meet you.” I stood and waved as he drove off.
Maybe I’d have felt differently about it if I’d been dead. But it was a thankfully harmless mistake, one that was more the fault of whoever designed the junction than it was his. I was inclined to be forgiving.
I might feel differently about it now. A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a new and corrosive bad habit. I clicked on a YouTube video that promised a “Cyclist fighting back!” dashcam video.
It did at least deliver its short-term promise – a driver confronted a cyclist for not using a “bike lane” (it was actually a footpath), and as soon as the driver started to square up, the cyclist simply punched him in the face and he fell over. It was like a cartoon.
The more medium-term effect was that YouTube started putting more and more dashcam videos in front of me. And I have thus learned that the world is even more crammed with full-blown psychopaths than I had assumed.
The idea of uploading dashcam footage to YouTube is, supposedly, to reveal bad driving by others. It’s there for education, in the same way that the contents of the Daily Mail is there for social harmony. And there are, occasionally, examples of this – drivers overtaking on blind bends, using phones, swerving across three lanes of a motorway to get to an exit they’d failed to notice till the last minute. But none of this is really new.
The real education is about the people who upload the videos. The proactive self-righteousness – accelerating hard when they see someone pulling out of a side road ahead so they can then hit the brakes theatrically, hold down the horn and swear at the top of their voices to no one except the YouTube audience. They sometimes foam at the mouth over cyclists doing provocative things, like existing. (“Look at them! Riding along like they own the place!”) We shouldn’t take it personally. These people would go purple with anger at a passing cloud.
Here’s how insane the world of dashcam videos is – the comments section is the most intelligent bit of the experience. It’s full of people saying things like, “That looked all right to me. Perhaps you ought to have more patience with other people? My goodness but you have a short fuse.” Or, “Check Highway Code Rule 61 my friend, cyclists don’t have to use cycle lanes.”
What the videos do, like any algorithmic social media, is brainwash you. I’ve become convinced that everyone on the roads is a lunatic because now I keep being shown the driving habits of crazy people. This conviction is not a bad working hypothesis for staying alive, but it’s exhausting.
Also, I worry that the next time someone punts me gently into a ditch with a Transit, I’ll beat them to death. And that it will end up on YouTube.
