to be annoyed at motorists who say that cyclists don't pay road tax

[toweraboveyou]

There are a lot of motorists who insist that cyclists have no rights on the road as they don't pay any road tax. However, this is bollocks as road tax was abolished in 1937 and all road financing comes from general tax which means that cyclists, such as myself, pay as much towards the roads as anybody else and have just as much right to be on them safely.

Also following cyclist who you need to overtake and just as you do so they swerve and can't seem to keep their bike in one position.

Bloody dangerous and most have a death wish.

the other morning i was out at 5.30, it was thick fog, pitch black and still there were numpties on bikes, no lights with black clothing. you couldnt make it up

The cycle to work scheme, although a good idea in principal, has made this problem worse.

More hikes out in rush hour, and most of which haven't had a cycling proficiency test.
There should be a law that cyclists need to pass a year before going out on the road.

Every other thing on wheels has to!

But it's true that motorists pay vehicle excise duty and not cyclists.Since money is a homogenous unit you can't really say that x tax pound pays for Y!

yes i also have a number plate on the back of my car that can be written down and reported. what do you write down a cyclist 'silver mountain bike with Lycra clad male'.
Ive ridden horses through central London, over London bridge, through busy high streets, quiet residential roads and country lanes. cyclists and drivers can be dangerous arseholes, so can horse riders! they all piss me off whoever is being dangerous.

Of course there are cyclists that piss people off, however there are far, far less of them than there are car drivers who piss people off.

Most cyclist also have cars and pay road tax.

Does paying road tax give you the right to be a nobbish car driver??

I think car drivers who complain need to remember that pedestrians were here before they were. If you look at it legally then pedestrians have the right of way on all roadways (although who would have thought that!)

If you have two cars it doesn't mean that you only have to pay 1 lot of tax.

lockets - yes that was terrible. Has that never happened with a car driver? We all seem to take it for granted that car drivers act like arseholes.

Unfortunatley pedestrians don't have the right of way anymore. That changed a long time ago.

If you had pedestrians walking in the road everywhere then people would be moaning more about that than cyclists or motorists

lockets, so should drivers use the roads correctly - how many people on here have had near-misses with cars?

The OP didn't post about dangerous cycling, she posted about being annoyed about people referring to "road tax", as though only people who paid VED were entitled to be on the road, and only a few posts into the thread people piled in and started complaining about cyclists. It doesn't happen on threads about driving: people have the sense not to judge all drivers by the bad ones, but they don't seem to be able to apply the same logic to cyclists.

JemsGem - yes that was foolish, however I've also been out at that time and seen car drivers without lights on. Who is going to cause the most damage?

Why is there so much anti - cycling angst on here? I am not a cyclist or a driver (I can drive) but I love to see cyclists out on the roads. Anything that takes vehicles off our roads must be a good thing.

Even though there are a lot more car drivers than cyclist, I still come across more nobbish cyclists than motorists day to day.

what is this a case of well you act like a dick so i can as well?
if someone does something wrong they are wrong regardless of what other people are doing, i hope we are not raising our children in the same way!
oh well i doesn't matter what you do because they are doing it more than you!

Hear hear, Orenishi. I cycle (very boringly and law-abidingly), I also drive. I see really terrible driving all the time, but people seem to feel that drivers are entitled to behave like that, whereas the fact that some cyclists behave badly somehow translates into hating all of us.

More. Yclists on the road - great! I do agree.

But not these ones that have no idea how to ride safely.

They need to take a test first

I would like a pavement parking and use tax - 100 pounds per park

like this
or this
or even this

No, AhsataN, it's a case of applying the same standards to everyone instead of pouring bile over cyclists in a way that doesn't happen to drivers, even though bad driving does far more damage than bad cycling (as lockets pointed out, if the cyclist who nearly hit her DH had been a driver, he would probably have been killed). Some of the online comments on that Times journalist who was hit by a lorry were truly shocking: they implied that she was on a bike so she automatically deserved to be squashed by an HGV. I haven't seen anything quite that bad on this site, but I've seen things tending in that direction.

no one ever seems to moan about cars doing this and it is catching One does it and others follow suit

can't cycle in the cycle lane - then the motorist complain about bikes on the road..

Orenish - there are far less cyclists that piss people off than drivers as there are far less cyclists than drivers out there.

I would imagine that given that a fair number of people (just the general population) are twats, that the same amount of cyclists as drivers are dicks.