COMMENT

Road rage has a new face… And it’s mine.

It’s better now than in the photo hereabouts. That’s thanks to 20-plus stitches and the skill of one of the doctors at Sandringham public hospital in bayside Melbourne. Equally skilful, the dentist that fixed my chipped teeth…

I’ll wear the scar until I shuffle off. It’s pretty well hidden thanks to my instance in retaining the designer stubble that too many of us blokes use as an excuse not to shave each day.

The damage is a product of road rage, but it’s also a product of the growing enmity between cyclists and motorists.

Many of you alas will have now turned off. If that’s the case, your attitude is part of the problem. And it needs to change.

The other, equally problematic component is a percentage of bike riders that continue to do the wrong thing. That needs to change too.

My injury was the result of a punch – the second the driver in question laid on me. It came as the parting shot of a ‘discussion’ that took place at a service station.

The driver in question obviously didn’t like the fact I’d called him on an action that in my opinion placed the life of at least one cyclist in danger.

I was a few car lengths behind the other rider — a mate of mine, Andrew. We were on the left half of the left hand lane on the Nepean Highway. Melbourne readers will know the road. It was early Saturday morning, a time when perhaps cyclists are the dominant road users — that is in terms of numbers.

The vehicle in question came past me at speed, close enough to startle me — after riding for many years that doesn’t happen all that often. It then appeared to deliberately ‘buzz’, Andrew passing well within a distance I’d consider safe.

When Andrew yelled and gestured the vehicle, the driver slammed on the brakes. Clearly, he knew exactly what he was doing. A few metres on he repeated the act, sped up and then, 100 metres or so up the road, dived into the ‘out’ driveway of a service station.

I followed. A mistake in hindsight, but there comes a point where you simply have to say something.

The driver was immediately aggressive, jumping out of the car and doing his best to push me over… I’ll spare you the gory details but after some to-ing and fro-ing with Andrew and I, he punched me.

Then after I took photos of him and his rego, he decided my bike might be a good ‘exchange’ for the images. When that failed he hit me again. Hard.

Had I not been hereditarily gifted with a wide, low stance (duck’s disease) and a thick bonce, the result may have been catastrophic.

That was all in March of this year. While the local Victoria Police members I reported the incident to were thorough, there’s been no action against my attacker.

There will be no action… Apparently two witnesses (one of which was an unrelated party, the other my mate, Andrew), CCTV from the service station and my statement aren’t enough to deliver the reasonable expectation of a conviction.

Perhaps the fact the guy hit me twice allows him to escape the targeting of ‘one-punch’ offences. Perhaps if I’d had the temerity to be knocked out and or knocked over, it would have been handled with more vigour.

In truth, the whole affair has significantly impacted my attitude towards the Victorian force and the criminal justice system…

The fact is the goon that hit me put lives in danger in two ways: the punch, but more tellingly, by what appeared to be a deliberate action to scare or startle a bicycle rider.

This is the first time I’ve been punched. Alas. it’s not the first time I’ve seen the latter take place. Most other regular riders will have similar tales.

As I noted above, this has to change… Whether as car drivers we like it or not, we have a responsibility to other road users. This includes ‘soft’ users such as riders and pedestrians.

Those road users have responsibilities too.

I’m no angel on the road. It’s not uncommon for me to break the speed limit on the open road and in the boonies. It’s my belief that we have both open road speed limits and driver training requirements wrong in this country. But I do my very best to ensure that I pay attention to soft road users. Perhaps a lifetime of riding motorcycles and bikes does that to you.

Bicycles aren’t going away. And in the future there’ll be new classes of small vehicle a la Renault’s Twizzy EV that will also seek to share our roads. Are we going to knock them out of the way too?

The time to start to improve behaviour on our roads is now. At the risk of borrowing a cliché, think about it. In the long term, the life you save may be your own…