Taxi!

Hot on the heels of yesterday's post about good and bad motorists and cyclists, last night on the way home I was handed a gift from the blogging gods, in the form of a taxi driver.  To be clear, he was driving the taxi in which I was the passenger - there was no unpleasant roadside altercation involved - and to be absolutely fair to the driver, he was wearing hearing aids and so theoretically may not have heard anything I said (although I have my suspicions that his hardness of hearing was fairly selective, a bit like when a grandma says to a granddad, "Can you fetch the washing in dear?" and he says, "Pardon?  I can't hear you, love." and she says, "THE WASHING - CAN YOU GET IT IN?" and he says, "Eh? You'll have to speak up!" and she says, "Oh, never mind, I'll do it myself.")

We didn't get off to a good start - it was an account booking from my workplace and he couldn't find the building, and then once he had found it, he spent the first couple of minutes paying less attention to the road and more attention to trying to show me the "bleedin' awful" picture that was on his profile on Hail-O.  In spite of this, we managed to navigate a large swathe of North London in one piece before he said, "I see another one of me mates got killed the other day."  He'd just cut up a cyclist at the time, so it was pretty clear that he was referring to the tragic accident I wrote about yesterday.  I said, "Yes, it was tragic, wasn't it?"  He completely ignored me (or didn't hear me) and started to tell me all about Bad Cyclists and the things they do, and that the only way to stop them would be to hold them accountable.  I said that actually, if they are breaking the law, then they are accountable (e.g. jumping lights).  He heard that.  He said it's not the same as for cars, because if a car is speeding and there's a police car behind, the car will get pulled over.  I said that the same would be true of a cyclist.  He didn't hear me.  He said that he didn't mind cyclists who are just pootling about (he actually went up, marginally, in my estimation for using the word "pootling") but, "It's those eco-warrior types like Bradley Wiggins in their Lycra that I don't like."

It was at this point I realised that (a) I was very, very angry, on the basis that I didn't laugh at his utterly ridiculous assertion that Sir Wiggo represents eco-warriors, and (b) he didn't actually know where we were going, in spite of my having given my postcode when I called the cab company.  Once we'd sorted out (b), I went back to seething, in accordance with (a).  I said, "You only notice the bad cyclists.  The good ones are the ones you don't notice at all, because they are doing everything right."  He said, "You'd have to be mental to cycle in London."  I replied, "No, you just have to be sensible about it."  He said, "Nah, you've got to be mental, there's so much traffic."  I said, " Well I guess I'm mental, then," in an extremely agitated tone that I didn't realise was going to come out.  "You cycle in London, then?"  "YES." "At night?"  "YES." (Oh, OK, so it's only once so far, but that's not the point.)

He said, "In any case, all this promotion of cycling and stuff, they're only doing it to cause congestion, because congestion brings in money."  Yes, of course.  Nothing to do with climate change, an obesity epidemic or sustainability in any way at all.

The red mist was descending by this point.  There were other words coming my way, which were receiving terse, monosyllabic answers, and we couldn't get to my house soon enough (really, it was a minor miracle that we got to my house at all, so wedded to his rubbish satnav was the driver).  This is precisely the kind of Bad Driver I was talking about yesterday - the one who believes that all cyclists are Bad Cyclists and that he can do no wrong.

We cycled to work this morning, it being only moderately grey outside.  There wasn't much to report, other than an idiot bus driver who spent a full minute sitting at a bus stop with his right indicator on and all his passenger doors closed before we decided to overtake him anyway, at which point he turned his indicator off and pulled out to the right.  However, just after James had sounded a little bit like he was encouraging me to sneak up the inside of a line of traffic at traffic lights, we saw A Wondrous Thing, another gift from the gods of blog - there were two Police Community Support Officers standing at the lights pulling over cyclists who were jumping them and dishing out PCNs.  Who says cyclists aren't accountable, eh, Mr Taxi Driver?