Mountain biking.. clearly. By a mile...

Sorry, but put a world class mountain biker on a road bike and he'd do ok. Put a road biker on this trail and he literally dies.

Also, lycra... no-one should wear it

The assailant had to run pretty far before he was in pistol range.

If the biker had been more wary, like concealed carry folks are, he'd have rode off in the opposite direction immediately.

Good thing the biker didn't have a gun; someone could have been killed, or at the very least, the robbers would have another weapon.

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I feel like I can take a middleground on the whole tailgating issue, as a commuting biker I tend to experience both ends of the equation quite regularly and IMHO the problem lies in the extremes in attitude.

On the one hand if you drive/ride a lot and have good confidence in the vehicle and roadcraft in general (frequently the case with professional van and truck divers) it can be extremely frustrating when people don't practice good lane and speed discipline. I don't mean people maintaining a decent pace (it's your problem if you want to go faster than posted limits and they don't) I mean people either:
A. Driving below the posted limit (within reason)
B. Accelerating to speed absurdly slowly or slowing to 2mph to take a corner you could hit at 10-20 comfortably
C. Hogging the outside/passing lane because THEY are going as fast as THEY want to go so why should they speed up or slow down to get out of everybodys way? (C**TS!)

Under the above circumstances I understand why people end up tailgating, in fact I think it happens without much of a conscious effort most of the time. They are going so far below the pace the seems reasonable that you close the gap without realising. Getting to this stage is understandable/inevitable, it's what you do next that defines you as a responsible road user:

A responsible driver/rider at this point backs off, the point has already been made to the driver in front. They know they are going slower than you want to go or that you want to pass in the passing lane they are hogging. Sitting on their bumper is not only dangerous to both of you but it's obnoxious and likely to be counter productive. When you see someone driving too close your natural response is to slow down for safety or simply as a fuck you to the other guy. Even if you were about to get out of their way you might change your mind and think "screw you buddy I got the hint but now your just being rude".

When I back away I find people let me through far more often, wheras in the past when i've just tail gated them like a dick it's got me nothing but two angry motorists (and a hugely elevated chance of an incident). The lorry driver could have left a bigger gap but it didn't look that unreasonable (plus lorries have a hard time gaining speed and are naturally inclined (and taught) to preserve it where possible).

It might not be that unfair to suggest he was antagonising the car infront, but it pales into insignificance compared to...

.....the other side of the equation (which blue peugeot falls squarely into) who are generally IMHO far worse/more dangerous. The one's that adopt an imperious and selfish attitude to speed and road position. "I'm going as fast as I want to go and there's car on the inside that I'll pass in about 30seconds so I'm just going to sit in the outside lane going 2mph faster than slow lane traffic, because why should I have to go to the trouble of changing lanes to let someone else go faster than I want to go!"

Touching the brakes to give a tailgater a shock done properly is fine (I might even go so far as to recommend it) but holy shit! I think it'd be dangerous to scrub more than 1 or 2mph never mind an illegal stop on a dual carageway. Even if there was a mechanical reason for stopping it's still illegal to stop there without pulling off to the side.

Either way 45k in damages feels like pretty just deserts. I dearly hope he got at least a 12 month ban to boot. There's slipping up and then there's premeditated dangerous driving!

I usually try to see things from everybody's perspective when it comes to stuff like this but the Peugot driver is so disproportionately stupid and reckless than I can't really even try to defend him/her. I get why they might have been annoyed but that all became irrelevant the moment they tried to cause an accident!

It looked to me like the trucker was trying to stop the bike from passing, like I've seen many cars do when a bike is coming from behind. I think it was an instance of "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" at best, and he thought he would have the door open in time for the bike to stop so he could yell at them, but miss timed it and hit them instead. That's giving him the benefit of a doubt that he wasn't trying to hit them. I've seen this kind of behavior multiple times in the bay area where lane splitting is totally legal. Some people just can't stand that someone else has an advantage and want to play cop, I've seen them drive down the line between lanes to block bikes from passing, once I saw someone do that to a motorcycle cop, it didn't go so well for them.
I can't think of another logical explanation for the truck to be opening it's door in moving traffic, can you?
I think the biker was being unsafe passing so fast in moving traffic, but it depends on what the law is where this happened. If that's legal there, 100% truckers fault. If not, shared responsibility, maybe 20%biker-80%trucker+-, because a bike passing is reasonably foreseeable, a moving truck opening it's door in traffic is not.

You guys seem to be assuming the trucker deliberately opened his door to take out the biker. It looks to me like the trucker was getting out of his truck. Seriously, who would stick his arm out of the cab of his vehicle into the path of a motor vehicle travelling at high speed. His only mistake was not checking his mirror to see if some crazy-assed biker was flying up from behind between two closely spaced lines of traffic at an excessive speed. I think I'll go with the OP's comment of "Karma".

Motorcycles seldom kill car drivers, usually the other way 'round, but I think living with the fact someone died because they hit you is bad enough. The biker won't care any more, he's dead.

Personally, I don't see any reason for motorbikes on public streets. Litre for litre (gallon for gallon) they pollute more than a car. You can take the exhaust of any motorbike, hook it up to the intake of any modern car, and the resulting exhaust will be far less toxic than the bike alone. They are not environmentally conscious in any way beyond miles per gallon, so here's a preemptive "shut up" about that.

Bike riders fall into two categories, wannabe racers and wannabe Hell's Angels. They either get off on zigzag'ing high acceleration/deceleration or they think it makes them look badass. Anything else said is just an excuse and self-delusion.

So as a point of pedantry....he could have totally made that corner if he had stayed off the brakes kept a steady throttle and leaned harder to the left (he was on course to make the corner if the car hadn't startled him). Braking is almost never the right thing to when in or leaving a corner, it just stands the bike up and sends you wide.

Target fixation is a bitch!

However, solid white lines mean no overtaking/crossing to the opposite lane for good reason (the entire manoeuvre was technically illegal here in the UK because of said solid lines). It was foolish to even attempt what he did there and doubly so if you haven't mastered proper corner control/reactions to be able to deal with the unexpected effectively (which he clearly had not as evidenced by the vid).

All of that said, we all make mistakes. This chap might normally be a better rider than he appears here and simply made a poor judgement call entering that corner which resulted in him panicking and having to bail. (He may also have been a retard with too much power and a death-wish. Those guys are definitely around)


Also Re: @Darkhand and @bcglorf

Bikes very rarely kill car drivers. It's generally only a side on collision with a door that can do that and even then only at serious speed. Bikes rarely weigh over 250kg and most sports bikes are sub 200kg. They simply don't carry anything like the kind of energy a car would even at 100mph+.

I'm not saying it's impossible but it would be very unlikely here. He however could have easily broken his neck if he'd hit the car head on. My brother had a head on with a car about a year ago at 60-70ish (combined) and fractured his (fortunately made a complete recovery since).

Bikers are almost always a far bigger danger to themselves than anyone else. This was reckless but mostly for himself.

I suspect however that lessons were at least learned!

I remember playing this game. I also remember a story an old dude I helped through "Meals on Wheels" told me about a biker he saw break a pickup's headlight from his motorcycle with a chain belt. I thought "that's pretty badass". hehe. A good tale of vengeance

If you can't safely turn across a lane of traffic then absolutely yes you do not make the turn. Even if the reason you can't safely make the turn is because someone else is speeding at some ridiculous pace, you still stop and don't turn.

My objection was the tone of the post I responded to suggesting only the the biker was at fault. I have no problem with declaring speeding putting someone partially at fault. I have a bigger problem though saying that crossing a lane of traffic when unsafe to do so is in any world a lesser danger, hazard and fault.

I'll agree to both at fault, but always more fault for crossing when unsafe.

Unfair to say to drive defensively? [edit -- I just read my original post, and I did say that he was at fault. I stand by that.]

The car driver was clearly at fault. And. That bike probably was hard to see in front of the car s/he just passed, coming out of its silhouette. That biker changed the landscape of the road quickly and an inattentive car driver almost took hir out.

Open it up wide if you are alone on the road. Cars around? Be careful.

In my opinion, this video would be a great teaching tool for anyone who drives a bike. In fact, my boss just bought a new motorcycle -- you have inspired me to share this with him.

I'd be very surprised if, if he had hit the car, the police didn't at the very least think his speed was a factor in the accident.

It's all well and good to say never, but there are obviously times where this would be stupid. If I was in a car making a turn across traffic in a position where I wouldn't be able to cross the lane fast enough if a vehicle came along doing 150mph, should I not take the turn? In that case you're saying if it did happen I would be at fault, but it would also be the case that there was nothing I could have done to avoid the accident other than not make the turn?

Whether or not this video is one of those incidents is debatable, but using absolutes is not the way the law, or common sense, works.

The biker is obviously speeding, the person in the car obviously didn't see them. The biker is breaking the law, the car driver is perhaps driving without due care and attention. Without seeing more of the road and knowing the speed of the bike it would be impossible to know the extent of any negligence. But it's not really unfair to say someone was doing something wrong when they're speeding.

I'd say that's unfair to the biker. When crossing lanes, the vehicle turning across the lane NEVER has right of way at an unlit intersection and the vehicle heading straight always has right of way.