I’d be astonished if JC was prosecuted based on the strength of the evidence. “Sorry officer, but I got out of my car to take the picture whilst waiting at the crossing.”

Then then he’d be illegally parked.

Everybody should wear head-web-cam, 24-7.

Is illegal parking more serious than wasting police time?

Face facts, clarkson could have run him over, and still **** all would be done about it.

^ Unless you’re a copper….

http://road.cc/content/news/107764-taxi-driver-who-deliberately-swerved-cycling-policeman-could-face-jail

Def a complaint to The Times due here, and JC getting reported to the Police for using a mobile phone when driving
Bring on self-driving cars…

I’d be astonished if JC was prosecuted based on the strength of the evidence. “Sorry officer, but I got out of my car to take the picture whilst waiting at the crossing.”

Then then he’d be illegally parked.

But then there may well be recorded CCTV of the area, from static cameras or from other vehicles,perhaps even a police officer who believed he was there, and then suddenly remebered he wasnt, and got prosecuted.

Just one of those things that happen everyday, and where nobody gets hurt only the fashion Police, and twitterists /forumites.

CBA, Sherlock’s coming on.

No PSA’s on here for Top Gear in future then?… 🙂

project – Member

Just one of those things that happen everyday, and where nobody gets hurt only the fashion Police, and twitterists /forumites.

Really?

JC is, sadly, one of the most influential journalists in Britain*.

He has constantly insisted, as have his acolytes, that his TV persona is merely an act, a mere bluff and he is in fact, just an ickle fwuffy kitten who weally, weally wuves cyclists.

Well, he’s now shown that to be a lie.

Sadly, there will still be cyclists who continue to believe he doesn’t really hold them in contempt or consider them to be lower forms of life.
Oooh, look, he’s just blown up a caravan! Ohh, he’s laughing at the little one again etc, etc.

* The same country that gave us Russel Bulgin, Laughing Len Setright, George Bishop, Mark Williams and Phil Llewellyn.
God forgive us.

Except that unlike you I’m not basing my opinion solely on how he appears in public. I’m assuming that you don’t have a direct relative who does know him and his family very well.

curiously, CR follows JC (though he also follows me, so I wouldn’t read too much into that!)

He just kept shouting increduously ‘you were four feet from the kerb, but you were four feet from the kerb, I’m a cyclist and you were four feet from the kerb!’.

Maybe Clarkson can be destroyed in the eyes of his car worshipping cyclist hating devotees with this admission that he’s a cyclist!

Shame then that he doesn’t seem to know anything about defensive cycling and chooses to attack his fellow cyclists.

Seriously though, you would hope something sticks about this. If anything could get through to the typical driver’s mentality, Clarkson getting busted and the aftermath possibly could achieve something beneficial.

Edit: Just imagine if he’s a regular club MAMIL, such a photo would be astounding.

Edit: Just imagine if he’s a regular club MAMIL, such a photo would be astounding.

disturbing more like, hes got quite a belly on him, I reckon he wears a girdle for the TV!

Words I never expected to write: a brilliant article by Jeremy Vine in the DM (please do click through, it’s worth reading)

http://www.dailyma?l.co.uk/news/article-2538377/Why-drivers-want-kill-Death-threats-Near-misses-A-run-Clarkson-Radio-2-host-scared-cyclist-JEREMY-VINE-terrors-faces-road.html

[mod edit – text C&P’ed on the following page for your convenience]

Text of DM article;

The driver of the silver Volkswagen never saw me. That’s what I would like to believe.

Certainly, she seemed unaware as she executed her manoeuvre: a gentle overtake on the right, then a sudden violent yank on the steering wheel which sent her car slewing left across the path of my bicycle.

I caught a glimpse of the driver, a brown-haired woman laughing heartily with her passenger.

I want to say I was shocked by such unthinking driving. But after a year cycling on the roads of London — something I began only because I was sick of paying £80 a month to a gym I never visited — I was not remotely surprised.

I did not even raise an eyebrow as I squeezed hard on both brakes and felt my back wheel skid. Having avoided an impact with the unpredictable VW by only a couple of feet, I came to a stop.

I put my left foot on the kerb, adjusted my gloves, took a deep breath and saw the mist leave my mouth in the cold air. Yep: I was definitely still alive. The offending car pulled off happily down a side street.

The near-miss is a daily occurrence when you ride a bike in any city in Britain. But for me there was one outstanding feature of this incident as I made my way towards Hammersmith: I had captured it on film.

A friend who was aware I’d started cycling to work gave me a helmet camera and some advice. ‘Try it,’ he said, ‘because you’ll want to review your journeys when you get home.’

It didn’t sound like an appetising way to spend free evenings, but I now have a collection of movie thrillers to rival anything by Hitchcock.

And, thanks to social media, I have been able to share them.

My feelings about Twitter are mixed — no one will say on their deathbed they wished they had spent more time on it — but it does give you a simple way of comparing experiences.

When I posted about the incident with the VW, I was deluged by supportive comments from other cyclists as well as clips of narrow squeaks ten times more terrifying.

‘Welcome to our world,’ the riders all said.

Despite such narrow run-ins, I am OK. Today, yes. Far, far fitter than when I belonged to that gym (and nearly two stone lighter). But tomorrow? I don’t know if I will be OK tomorrow.

Every morning when I leave the house, my wife says farewell in the manner of Japanese women who waved off pilot husbands in World War II.

If nothing else, cycling in a major British city reminds you to make a will and tell your mum you love her.

But why is it so dangerous?

Car drivers have no reason to hate cyclists. If we all gave up our two wheels and bought 4x4s, the whole country would be stuck in a jam from Kingston to Kilmarnock.

Cycling is clean, efficient and very cheap. My last car service cost more than £900; when I had my bicycle looked over, the fellow apologetically charged me £72.

More…

Tesco driver causes road chaos by making illegal U-turn in huge articulated lorry ‘which put pedestrian in danger’
Harley-Davidson rider injured when he was ‘shunted off bike by angry bus driver’ is sent a HIGH-VIS JACKET by transport firm

But when I said that I wanted to believe the silver VW driver never saw me, it is because the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate. She did see me and was quite happy to run me off the road.

And that is why she was laughing.
Since a spate of fatal accidents involving cyclists in London, hundreds of officers have been monitoring the city’s most dangerous junctions and roads

Since a spate of fatal accidents involving cyclists in London, hundreds of officers have been monitoring the city’s most dangerous junctions and roads

Some drivers do seem to resent, even hate, cyclists and this makes cycling more dangerous than any pothole or badly designed T-junction.

It is great that Mayor Boris Johnson and his ‘cycle czar’ Andrew Gilligan — both keen cyclists — are asking for ways to make cyclists safer in London after six died in a fortnight last November, but I fear they will miss the point.

The biggest danger is not road layout but road users. The hostility of some drivers is mind-boggling.

Take the day I got caught on Marble Arch by a car that had roared through a light just as it turned red.

The man ripped through the air inches from me and caused serious panic, so I thought I would gently let him know that he would soon hurt someone.

I caught up with his car at the next traffic light. I try to be polite at all times, calling other road users ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ so they know I am not one of those expletive-spewing Lycra louts. It is always possible they might be a Radio 2 listener, after all.

So I knocked gently on the man’s passenger-side window and said: ‘Sir, just to let you know, you nearly killed me back there.’
‘I know our crowded capital will become a far better place if many thousands of people do what I did and take up cycling to work, but most of my friends are simply too scared and with reason’. File picture

‘I know our crowded capital will become a far better place if many thousands of people do what I did and take up cycling to work, but most of my friends are simply too scared and with reason’. File picture

The driver, an unshaven Mediterranean-looking man in a pale suit, leant over and bared his teeth, hissing in broken English: ‘I. WANT. TO. KILL. YOU.’

Now that did take me aback.

In the morning, I dress like a U.S. Navy Seal on his way to shoot Bin Laden. I am kitted out like a soldier and sometimes behave like one because London’s roads are a battlefield and my life is at stake.

The £165 light on my helmet is so powerful it will temporarily dazzle any driver I direct it at — unfortunately necessary to ensure he doesn’t suddenly shoot out of a side street and push me into a bus.

The camera sits beside it. My bike is fitted with a total of three other lights, and there are two more flashing reds on the back of my cycle helmet to make sure an HGV truck doesn’t simply ride straight over me.
Vine entered into a Twitter row with Jeremy Clarkson over the rights of cyclists

Vine entered into a Twitter row with Jeremy Clarkson over the rights of cyclists

I wear a fluorescent tunic that says POLITE in an official-looking font on the back in the faint hope that it might cause the aggressive motorist behind to let up on the revving for just a second. Fat chance.

Waterproof trousers and a new padlock were my most exciting Christmas presents.

Oh, and I have now had an airhorn fitted to my handlebars, so loud it can probably be heard in Costa Rica. I used it this week when a pedestrian wearing super-sized green headphones left the pavement on impulse and walked across my path with his back to me. The 115 decibels almost knocked him off his feet, but at least we both survived the encounter.

Pedestrians can be as much a danger as a speeding car. If you are a driver, the chances are that you are reading this with a succession of four-letter words coming to mind. You’ve probably had heart-stopping encounters with reckless cyclists. But can I plead for your understanding?

I never cross red lights. I don’t ride on the pavement — unless a particular stretch of road looks very unsafe.

A few days ago, the speed-hungry Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson posted a tweet which read: ‘It’s middle of the road point-makers like this who make car drivers so angry about cyclists.’

It showed a picture of a cyclist innocently occupying the middle of the lane just short of a zebra crossing.

My understanding is that the Highway Code, the Department of Transport and the Institute of Advanced Motorists all recommend that cyclists ‘take the lane’ when it is too narrow for a car to overtake safely.

So, in a state of fury and probably without thinking for long enough, I replied to Clarkson: ‘He has every right — you muppet.’

This then triggered the Twitter equivalent of a brawl in a Wild West saloon, where anyone within earshot (in Twitter terms, the thousands of people who follow us both) felt free to throw chairs and tables around.

I was told by several people that I ‘should not be on the road because you do not pay road tax’ (never mind that I do, on my car).

Another tweeter said Clarkson ‘should have knocked the cyclist over because that spot is near a hospital’. One wrote: ‘Run him down like the dog in Lycra he is!’

A few weighed in against Clarkson, but it was clear to me that he had won the argument in the eyes of the audience. Sure, on Twitter such a spat is entertaining. But take that hostility on to the road — put that angry mind in charge of a metal hulk on four wheels or even 12 — and it becomes a threat to the life of any cyclists.

Which is why London is simply terrifying for any person on a bicycle.

I know our crowded capital will become a far better place if many thousands of people do what I did and take up cycling to work, but most of my friends are simply too scared and with reason.

I am now one near-miss away from selling my bike and getting back in the car, which would make Jeremy Clarkson happy at least.

The sad fact is that I feel like I have become involved in a war that puts my life at risk every time I strap on my helmet. And all I wanted was a narrower waistband and to save £80 on the gym.

STW doesn’t allow direct links to the Daily Fail website because it finds it an “abhorrent publication”.

Pathetic.

Thanks, wwaswas. 🙂

… and then provides a link … 🙄

You should find direct link works now 😉

(mods – I think it’s justified in this case, and promise not to do it again!)

too late I already went over to the fail website aaaargghhh!

(unlike woppit I have the wit to cut and paste a link, something that is obviously enough to outsmart its fans)

In an obscure way JC, has raised CYLISTS profiles by a huge amount all by driving a british made, indian owned very profitable, highly exported in demand off road vehicle, he has made lots of comments on numerous cycling forums, will probably sometime appear in the papers giving his side of the story, the cyclist involved will be tracked down, (quite easily done), and made a fellow media celeb for a week.

Nobody was hurt,but like i said its raised the profile of inner city cyclists for all.

Well done Mr Clarkson, and thankyou.

Good to see Vine developing some life experience and awareness, but I note he still thinks that his excise duty is paying for the roads…

unlike woppit I have the wit to cut and paste a link

Don’t be a twerp. What makes you think I didn’t? Oh wait – you know whats going on because you have special mind powers, right?

Does he? The only comment I can see from him is one of the standard rebuttals to the “you don’t pay road tax” brigade – to be honest given the audience for that article it’s probably the one they’re most likely to understand.

I was told by several people that I ‘should not be on the road because you do not pay road tax’ (never mind that I do, on my car)

There’s 2 sides to every story and who hasn’t been annoyed by the inconsiderate cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass?

Admittedly I don’t cycle in the capital but whenever I go out on the streets here, I do my best to be courteous and even handed and hope that others will be appreciative and reciprocate.

We as cyclists have a responsibility to each other to present ourselves in the best light to the rest of the world because there’s something that changes in everyone when they get behind the wheel of a vehicle that cuts them off from humanity for a while and if we make the roads a battleground we will lose.

I was told by several people that I ‘should not be on the road because you do not pay road tax’ (never mind that I do, on my car)

I can forgive that. It’s much easier to argue that, in common with c85% (?) of ‘cyclists’, you have paid all the same motoring related taxes as the twerp claiming you’ve not right to be in the road since you own a car as well as a bike.

Speeder – Member
There’s 2 sides to every story and who hasn’t been annoyed by the inconsiderate cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass?

me!
honestly, in 15+ years of driving its never happened

been subjected to some pretty bad behaviour by motorists tho!

me!
honestly, in 15+ years of driving its never happened
been subjected to some pretty bad behaviour by motorists tho!
[/quote]

+1 – I’m curious to hear from anybody on here who has actually been annoyed by a cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass – personally I reckon that’s almost a physical impossibility in any situation where it’s safe for cars to pass.

In the 25+ years I’ve been using the roads I can recall 2 incidents where cyclists have annoyed me due to poor road behaviour – one of them was when I was on a bike, and neither put anybody in danger apart from themselves (unlike the “annoying” things lots of drivers do).

Speeder – Member

There’s 2 sides to every story and who hasn’t been annoyed by the inconsiderate cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass?

Once or twice a week I see cyclists riding two abreast where I THINK it would be just as safe and more considerate to cycle in single file.
I might be wrong.

However, I see terrible driving constantly when I’m in the car.

I would imagine cycling attracts roughly the same proportion of bellends as driving, but due to the consequences of their actions the cycling bellends moderate their behavious somewhat.

I was annoyed by a lorry this morning, that didn’t want me to go first through the traffic island space, despite being behind me with about 15 yards to go…

I’ve never been “annoyed” by a cyclist. There’s one who commutes on a busy A road that it takes a while to get past, but my reaction to him is mostly ” braver man than me” he gets honked, and waved at all the time by the drivers being held up for ooooohhhh, seconds at a time sometimes 🙄

I’m curious to hear from anybody on here who has actually been annoyed by a cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass – personally I reckon that’s almost a physical impossibility in any situation where it’s safe for cars to pass

Indeed given you need to go on the other side of the road to overtake why are you not annoyed by all the cars coming theother way that stop you overtaking safely?

Why blame the bike for this as its the other road users that prevent the overtake

I never ever been annoyed by a cyclist

We as cyclists have a responsibility to each other to present ourselves in the best light to the rest of the world because there’s something that changes in everyone when they get behind the wheel of a vehicle that cuts them off from humanity for a while and if we make the roads a battleground we will lose.

I think we should attempt to change the attitude of those behind the wheel rather than think we can cycle in a happy cheery way that makes them drive nicely

STW doesn’t allow direct links to the Daily Fail website because it finds it an “abhorrent publication”.

Pathetic.
well if it annoys you it just got even funnier

I, for one, am completely shocked at the revelation that Jeremy Clarkson turns out to be an arrogant, dangerous-driving bawbag in real life. I thought it was all just put on, for the telly.

well if it annoys you it just got even funnier

Why’s that then?

It is shocking to discover he’s not as good an actor as you thought.

Staggering, isn’t it.

Jesus made me

StefMcDef – Member

I, for one, am completely shocked at the revelation that Jeremy Clarkson turns out to be an arrogant, dangerous-driving bawbag in real life. I thought it was all just put on, for the telly.

Neither am I. 😀

Not read the Top Gear love-ins on here?
There appear to be a huge proportion of people who genuinely do believe his schtick is an act.

Judge a man by the friends he keeps . Not always correct but with friends like Brooks,little Murdoch and call me Dave .

There’s 2 sides to every story and who hasn’t been annoyed by the inconsiderate cyclist who won’t allow cars to pass?

I’ve never been annoyed either! If you have, its *your* failing, not theirs.

People make similar complaints about lorries overtaking, caravans, horses, slow drivers etc etc.. it just demonstrates a sense of entitlement many people feel when driving, as if the roads have been built for people driving fast, and anyone doing otherwise needs to get out of the way. Its entirely incorrect, and just leads to frustration and possibly road rage.