Passengers/drivers that hurl abuse

Portrush Philly

I commute often at night all year round and there seems to be a certain breed of driver/passengers that comes out when the lights have gone out!

I was wondering if the following issues are isolated to my area of the UK (north coast of NI) or whether others riders experience similar abuse:

Usually when riding anytime between 11pm and 1 am at night I often seem to be the subject of abuse from passing vehicles when making my way home. The occupants (usually the boy racer breed) seem unable to drive past me without feeling the need to beep their horns. This horn is often accompanied with a comment of some sort, the favourites are all present, ''your chain is flat'' & '' your wheels are going round'' etc together with the occasional favourite words of encouragement ''go on ya boy ye''!

Why do they feel the need? I'm bothering no one, have sufficient visibility via lights & clothing.

I can liken it only to some form of tourettes that they possibily have!

I had hoped that the cooler nights would have made them less willing to put down their windows, but alas it has made no difference.

Has anyone else experienced this phenomena?

Jay dubbleU

Not personally but my wife has had it happen on a couple of occasions riding home from work - usually about 10 - 10.30pm - I suppose every area has its share of idiots

always_tyred

The shouting "boo" and leaping into the road in front of me joke never gets any less funny than it was the first time.

passout

I get something most months - shouting, stupid waving, empty cans thrown etc. Usually lads in small cars....idiots.

Mettan

Portrush Philly wrote:

Usually when riding anytime between 11pm and 1 am at night I often seem to be the subject of abuse from passing vehicles when making my way home.

Could be the time of night - certainly earlier in the evening 8.00pm - 10.00pm , "chavs" tend to go out on a hoon in their little suped up Corsa's and Saxo's- not sure about that late though - I typically avoid night riding and minimise hassle were possible (generally).

fairweatherbiker

passout wrote:

I get something most months - shouting, stupid waving, empty cans thrown etc. Usually lads in small cars....idiots.

That'll be the chavelcade

Hooligan Bill

Small willy syndrome!

Nick6891

well i have to cycle home in about an hour so ill see if i get any abuse, normally its fine, but i dont go through any "chav" filled areas

always_tyred

Hooligan Bill wrote:

Small willy syndrome!

Oddly enough, someone once threw a sausage at me near the Scottish Parliament.

Now I know what it was.

AndyManc

Portrush Philly wrote:

Has anyone else experienced this phenomena?

Brain dead scum , I've had it a couple of times this year, one from some twat in the back of a taxi.

One reason I bought my head cam (not yet using it everyday) is so I can identify the vehicle and registration and smash s*** out if it if I see it in the area , or report it to the police .

What sort of brain dead cretin gets a kick out of it.

Hooligan Bill

Always Tyred wrote:

Hooligan Bill wrote:

Small willy syndrome!

Oddly enough, someone once threw a sausage at me near the Scottish Parliament.

Now I know what it was.

Chipolata I take it!

girv73

Ah those comic geniuses. Ignore them, they're just having a laugh. It's actually funny in their own little worlds, believe it or not.

Night riding in spideland can be dodgy. I've been shouted at, spat at and one night a couple of scummers knocked my cousin off his bike and tried (failed) to steal it . I don't get it so much on the city streets but I guess you'd see more of what you describe on the more open roads round Portrush.

always_tyred

Hooligan Bill wrote:

Always Tyred wrote:

Hooligan Bill wrote:

Small willy syndrome!

Oddly enough, someone once threw a sausage at me near the Scottish Parliament.

Now I know what it was.

Chipolata I take it!

No, I think it was a chav sausage from a van of questionable hygine.

ChrisLS

...I get shouted at by passing passengers from time to time but the wit gets lost in speed and traffic noise, apart from one that called me a cee u next tuesday...I just ignore them...

Bassjunkieuk

Can't say I've had many drivers throwing abuse at me but I generally don't cycle late at night. Had a kid shout "Your tyre's flat!" the other night.

Quite how he could tell my 25C tyres where flat when it was getting dark I'm not quite sure but it was still nice to be reminded :-) A quick inspection at the next lights confirmed that they where indeed still pumped up, but maybe a bit under pressure so I can only assume that is what he was pointing out............

Most of the times I get abuse from drivers is after I have a go at them for nearly running me over or failing to realise what a give way line is for!

gtvlusso

Suggets blowing them a kiss - really fecking gets their hackles up! It is my new insult, I used it on a van driver this morning...really riled him up, offered me out for a fight so I told him to "make love, not war" and rode off through the traffic....

tailwindhome

Best response is a slow hand clap

To be fair I have only used this while driving and some idiot overtakes and then dives in front of me or queue jumps in traffic.

Inexperienced bike handling skills would land me on my ar5e if I tried it.

Getting back to the OP I also live on the North Coast and have been amazed at the overall level of driver courtesy, maybe its a country thing? Only 1 incidence as you described but they were honking and waving at pedestrians too which was quite bizarre.

Bassjunkieuk

WheezyMcChubby wrote:

Best response is a slow hand clap

I did that the other night :-) Some ejit pulled out from the side of the road with loads of wheel spin in his lil Fiesta :-) It's so sweet to watch them when they have so little control over such a clever machine!

always_tyred

WheezyMcChubby wrote:

Best response is a slow hand clap

I wouldn't recommend doing/saying anything. That time of night you have no idea who's car is being driven. Even if its their own you are looking at a bad mix of over confidence and lack of consequential thinking. And possibly impairment.

No, late at night is the only time I'm not inclined to share my views with miniwillies.

hisoka

Being of the more "robust" nature of mankind I often get "you fat b*stard" yelled at me.
Do they think this is some kind of incentive to keep exercising to loose the extra pounds?

The yelling I admit is the thing that must disheartens me, sometimes if I get it more then once in a ride (bad city in ways for it) I start to think of chucking in the towel on the riding. But not going to let chavs beat my joy out of me.

fonty1978

Firstly, You're very lucky to have a commute in Portrush. My wife and i visited Portrush and the Antrim coast in May and wished we had taken our bikes over [oh well maybe next time]

Not that i'm suggesting this a course of action at all but.... :twisted: :twisted:

A lad i work with had someone hurl abuse at him from a car window for no reason, unfortunately for the motorist he had to stop for a traffic light at which point said rider emptied the contents of his water bottle through his open window

I've had a few comments but I find a condescending look oftens works.

Portrush Philly

Interesting idea! I have a 3L camelbak, I could really do some damage!

girv73

WheezyMcChubby wrote:

Getting back to the OP I also live on the North Coast and have been amazed at the overall level of driver courtesy, maybe its a country thing?

Nope, I see courteous driving for the most part in the city as well. Cars will move to the right to let cyclists filter up the left with more space, they wait behind me instead of overtaking and diving left, they'll hang back to let me change lanes in traffic and so on. I've really been quite impressed and a little surprised with it all.

OP: on the way home tonight I had all of the following shouted at me:

"Here mate, lend us that will ye!"
"Here mister giveus a backie home willya"
"Get those knees up!" (don't they get I'm clipped in and the "knee height" is fixed?)
"Ooo look he's got those little cycling boots as well" (I don't)

:roll:

saveswalking

The greatest insult I've had aimed at me was the quaint expression "get off and milk it!"

I thought I was doing quite well :roll:

sw

iainmoss

The other night on the way home from work (approx. 6:15pm) a teenager shouted
"Get a car!"
to which I instanlty retorted
"Get a life!".

I felt I had turned that one around quite successfully. It made me chuckle anyway!

Oh, and last night I had a serious verbal assault from a Jack Russell with its head out a car window.

I reckon if I were cycling later at night the incident count would be significantly higher, especially considering I cycle through the centre of Croydon!

MoonCircuit

An armed society is a polite society that's all I'm saying.

AndyManc

MoonCircuit wrote:

An armed society is a polite society that's all I'm saying.

It's a society with innocent victims and rampant crime, it's also a society that lives in fear.

MoonCircuit

AndyManc wrote:

MoonCircuit wrote:

An armed society is a polite society that's all I'm saying.

It's a society with innocent victims and rampant crime, it's also a society that lives in fear.

When only criminals are allowed guns that's exactly what it is.

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 409817.ece

chuckcork

MoonCircuit wrote:

An armed society is a polite society that's all I'm saying.

If you want to live in a Heinlein style fantasy then fine, where this is the case, then do so, but I'd rather not see my daughter shot dead because at 14 months she wasn't fast enough with a semi-automatic and the kid next door, who has just stolen his dads, was, and decided to play with daddies toy in the back yard.

While serious criminals will have access to firearms, there aren't a large number of serious criminals around to have them. Something to do with a restriction on the number of firearms generally, methinks. The local ones might have knives (and I say might, I wouldn't know for sure) but at least I could run away from a knife. Hard to run away from a bullet unless you are superman.

So leave the rest of us out of your fantasy world and spare us the defense of the homestead cr@p. I don't walk out of my front door every day expecting to have to fend off apaches, heavily armed criminals or anything else dangerous.

BTW, widespread ownership of firearms in the US hasn't actually prevented any mass gun deaths lately, has it? It seems to me to be the other way around....!

passout

Sorry to hear about your daughter - you should have got her a Uzi for Xmas.

Anyway, statistically, more young American children are killed by swimming pools each year than by guns (Levitt in 'Freakonomics'). Not sure how far up the list bikes would be?

Where would you keep a gun & do they sell carbon fibre ones?

We are in danger of veering into para military utopia one this one aren't we??

chuckcork

passout wrote:

Sorry to hear about your daughter - you should have got her a Uzi for Xmas.

I think a rocking horse might be more appropriate for a 14 month old....gee Christmas at your place must be interesting.

I can see it now: no dear, no pulling the pin from grenades inside. Do it outside instead....