It is very good advice. However, you don’t follow it blindly, you know. Obviously, oncoming traffic, road conditions, etc. dictates how far out you ride. The thing is that people swinging open car doors tend to see cars more than they see cyclists.

AFAICS what a lot of road users (whether they be drivers or cyclists) forget is that it is a privilege not a right.

Thos who abuse that privilege should have it taken away from them until such a time that they can constantly demonstrate that they won't abuse it.

I'm not really a cyclist, I have a bike and I meander around the lanes that lead to and from my home, I bike to the shops sometimes but living in the middle of nowhere really necessitates being a driver if you want to get anything done in a decent time. As such I have never really given much thought to cyclists, they get the same courtesy as horses and motorbikes, I don't overtake unless I can do so safely and without causing problems for horse, bike or motorbike. Our lanes are narrow enough not to have road-markings, but there's enough room for 2 cars to pass as long as they slow down a bit and pay attention to where they are on the road.

I was really annoyed about 6 months ago by what I saw as the "sudden" emergence of bikes riding in the middle of the road, making it impossible for me to overtake safely for far longer than I would normally wait. Our roads aren't particularly bendy you can see a long way but I couldn't overtake because the bikes were right in the middle of thelane. So I had to crawl along behind them until we got to the next village when the road got a bit bigger and had defined, painted lanes and they would move over to what I saw as the 'correct' position, along the side of the road avoiding the ironworks.

This has been happening to me again and again, even though there is plenty of room for me to overtake and I can see far enough to know I'm not going to hit them, there are a bunch of cyclists who insist on holding me up all the way to the next village and I'll admit it pisses me off, I understand about the road positioning thing when the cyclist doesn't feel it's safe for the car to overtake, but in this instance it appears to be nothing but buggeration.

ION I am shortly going to become a motorcyclist, at which point I will enjoy being able to get past them wherever they are in the road!!

My current favourite is when travelling through Richmond park.

There is a shared pedestrian/cyclist walkway and the road which is just over 2 cars wide with a 20mph limit.

There seems to be a tendency for cyclists to overtake you on the right (as you should do for overtaking) in to the path of oncoming traffic whilst another cyclist decides to sit in the blind spot behind the car on the left and undertake at the same time.

This leaves you very few options to move left to prevent the cyclist who's about to ride in to a car coming the other way getting splattered or moving right to allow the cyclist who's undertaking from sitting in the blind spot.

Undertaking in general needs to stop, as drivers generally look behind & right more than to the left.

But in general driving/riding standards need to improve. Mandatory testing for all road users with regular retests should be put in to ensure people on the roads can use them safely.

I'm fairly sure the standard of driving AND cycling has got worse over the period I've been on the roads (admittedly quite a long time). I suspect it's the whole 'time poor' thing, but I have nothing to back that up. So in theory recertification would be a useful exercise. Of course the counter argument is we can probably all drive/ride in a way that passes the test but there's little to compel us to follow on with those good practices once the test is done. We have to want to ride/drive responsibly, or people will tend to drive/ride selfishly whenever they can get away with it.

The culture needs to change on both sides. As long as it remains adversarial, no amount of cajoling and browbeating of either side will work.

Jon