Bike logos or body outlines?

There are signs on the streets of our town – white-painted bicycles on the roads. They mark where cyclists may go.

I once made this point to a Yaarpie harpy whose abrupt left turn from the middle of Edgecliff Road found me skittling across her high bonnet. As I gathered myself and my bent old bike from the unforgiving asphalt she spewed an inglorious gush of strangulated vowel sounds damning me for compromising the highly-polished finish of her four wheel drive.

The accident was my fault, she screeched, because I tried to pass her on the left. No, was my determinedly polite reply, I was merely riding in the bike lane. “Whaat baahk len? Thez no baahk len!”

“Well,” I muttered, limping around the front of her glossy black vehicle, stopped where we had collided, “that logo there does seem to indicate…” I pointed to the white-painted bicycle motif on the road under the driver’s door.

A flicker of the notion of remorse may have passed quickly behind her gimlet eyes. She gave me contact details for her lawyers. There was no point in pursuing compensation for my trivial loss of skin. I was lucky. I could get back on the bike – after minor straightening – and ride on.

But this problem persists: many motorists in their mighty machines have no [expletive deleted] idea of what is going on around them.
To survive, cyclists must be blatant on the road. Fluorescent clothing helps, night or day. Helmets that light up like Christmas trees work after dark. Avoid being relegated to the gutters on busy roads – take an entire lane. Let cars pass around you in their haste to the next red light where you slip past the idling queue of carbon consuming cretins.
Smile and wave thanks to considerate road users. Let the others know your opinion of life-threatening thoughtlessness.

There is no future in a crime-scene body-outline drawn beside every one of those empty bicycles white-painted on our roads.

Peter Whitehead