@acrow said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
But they're perfectly entitled to assume that everyone follows the law. Including laws regulating road traffic.
No no no. This is not how you should drive. At any time, someone could not follow the rules, and if you're assuming they will, you will have a collision (and potentially injure or kill someone) which you could have avoided.
This isn't even about cyclists, although they are one hazard you might encounter. What about:
- There is a horse approaching. It doesn't like the sound of your engine/the truck behind it/the guy who just dropped and broke a vase on the balcony of the house opposite, and bolts across your lane.
- You are driving along a road in the country or through a park. A deer jumps out and runs across the road. Damn that deer, it isn't respecting traffic laws!
- You are approaching a roundabout. A car on the roundabout signals to leave at your exit, but then doesn't.
- You're on a motorway in the fast lane. Someone pulls in to the lane inside you and undertakes. (This is illegal in the country in question.)
- You are driving along a city street. A small child is waiting at a pedestrian crossing, but gets distracted and steps out into the road.
- You are driving along a main road with right of way. A white van emerges from a side road without giving way.
In any of these situations, if you just assume rules will be followed, you will have a crash. You may enjoy the moral high ground of claiming it wasn't your fault, but you could still have avoided it.
And honestly motorists disobey traffic laws at least as often as cyclists. I see them parking on double yellows, speeding, crossing lane markers, running amber or red traffic lights, ignoring stop signs and the like all the time. You manage not to run into those (I assume) even when they break the rules.
And lucky for me, police tend to agree with me on this.
That's only 'lucky for you' if you've actually hit a cyclist, in which case I'd hope to see a less flippant attitude about it. It's also not true in many countries, if a car and a bike are in an incident there is a general assumption that the motorist is at fault unless provably not the case.