{"id":571118,"date":"2026-07-06T06:57:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T06:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/571118\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T06:57:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T06:57:09","slug":"you-just-nearly-killed-me-and-were-both-lucky-im-wearing-a-helmet-i-told-the-suv-driver-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/571118\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You just nearly killed me and we\u2019re both lucky I\u2019m wearing a helmet,\u2019 I told the SUV driver \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a near miss on my bike recently. It doesn\u2019t happen often, much less than people who don\u2019t cycle<\/a> imagine. I cycle daily, and once or twice a year a driver\u2019s inattention or aggression leaves me pale, shaky, blood hammering with adrenaline and deep rage.<\/p>\n

This time it was close enough that the driver stopped. Doubtless not all drivers of big shiny SUVs<\/a> wearing big shiny sunglasses consider the rest of us as dust beneath their wheels, but in my experience they run taxi drivers a close second. <\/p>\n

This woman swerved into the bike lane to undertake a car turning right, without indicating, and either without checking her mirrors or, more alarmingly, deciding that my life was a price worth chancing to get where she was going a few seconds earlier. She heard my scream through her open window, or maybe \u2013 unlikely \u2013 felt her car\u2019s contact with my foot and handlebar through all the layers of steel protecting her from the consequences of her actions. I fell off, but fairly slowly and on to the pavement, me and my bike bruised and scraped but not seriously hurt.<\/p>\n

Shock connected mind to mouth and bypassed all inhibition. I stumbled to her car, leaving the bike on the pavement. \u201cYou just nearly killed me,\u201d I said. \u201cWe\u2019re both lucky I\u2019m wearing a helmet.\u201d (A helmet will protect a cyclist\u2019s brain in this kind of low-speed, low-impact event. You should wear one. They don\u2019t help much when there\u2019s direct contact between a speeding vehicle and human bone, and they do make drivers more likely to pass too close.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t see you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t look,\u201d I said, grasping her windowsill and leaning in. \u201cYou didn\u2019t see me because you didn\u2019t look. You swerved into the bike lane without checking or indicating, because you don\u2019t care. You have mirrors, you have indicators, what do you think they\u2019re for?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll be sorrier,\u201d I was alarmed to hear myself say, \u201cif you don\u2019t change your ways. If you don\u2019t start caring about other people, one of these days there\u2019ll be bones under your wheels and blood on your windscreen and you won\u2019t be able to say you weren\u2019t warned. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t learn to look when you\u2019re driving you\u2019ll kill someone and have to live with it for the rest of your life. It\u2019ll be bad for the person you kill and worse for their family, but if you\u2019ve a shred of decency it will be bad for you too. You\u2019ll remember on your deathbed that you cared more about your own convenience than another person\u2019s life, that you couldn\u2019t even be bothered to look, and that\u2019s how others will remember you after you\u2019re gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horrified by what was coming out of my mouth, I managed to shut up. I pulled my bike up and pushed it in front of her car and rode away shaking. On the way home, as the shock passed and the bruising that would hamper every breath and step for the next week began to tell, I passed one of the Road Safety Authority<\/a>\u2019s signboards. Drivers, watch out for pedestrians, it said. Cyclists, be safe, be seen.<\/p>\n

I wanted to throw rocks at it. I wanted to lie on the ground and howl. There could be no more explicit statement of hierarchy: it is drivers\u2019 responsibility to \u201cwatch out for\u201d pedestrians, but cyclists are somehow to make ourselves seen by drivers who have no obligation to look. The signs, repeated on the hi-vis tabards we are encouraged to wear on our backs, assure drivers that they\u2019re right to be oblivious to cyclists, that it\u2019s our fault if they don\u2019t see us. If that driver saw it on her way home, she\u2019d have excused herself for not looking and blamed me for failing to \u201cbe seen\u201d.<\/p>\n

I was wearing a hi-vis tabard, as I always do. I had a flashing light, as I always do. My bike helmet is a noticeable colour, my riding position upright and my progress stately. After a lifetime of urban cycling, I\u2019m a defensive cyclist (and driver). There is nothing more I can do to \u201cbe seen\u201d, and nothing I can do about drivers who don\u2019t look.<\/p>\n

And yes, not all cyclists are well equipped, experienced and careful, and not all drivers are aggressive or careless. But the official messaging in this country contributes to our jeopardy, and hexing negligent drivers one at a time is a briefly satisfying but not structural solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had a near miss on my bike recently. It doesn\u2019t happen often, much less than people who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":571119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,2529,13,14,2215,6,11,12,15,16,8300,5,34438,28286,7,8,2212,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-571118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-cycling","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-for-you","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-motors","tag-news","tag-rsa","tag-sarah-moss","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-weekendreview","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116871734462266464","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}