Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnnyBravo
It was obvious she got me to hit her too everyone, but when the law says you're at fault what ya gonna do???
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I could be wrong about this, but I think the vast majority of people on the road (outside of war zones & violent third world countries) don't want to hurt others, steal from them (via insurance scams) or cause suffering. It sounds like you got unlucky and met one of those rare sociopaths that isn't part of that majority.
I struggle a little bit with how much I should adjust my riding to account for malice. I think there is some difference between riding defensively to protect yourself from
stupidity, carelessness and human-error and riding defensively to protect yourself from
active attack.
I guess some kind of balance has to be found. At the extreme end, where you assume everyone is an enemy, you would make
very slow progress on your rides. I imagine it would be like traversing a city in a war zone. You'd have to start your ride with a map of the area and a mission plan! I think that is too extreme though. Thinking more practically, we could consider what the common threats are and how best to defend against them. This then reduces the probability of being successfully attacked. Some common acts of malice which might be worth learning to defend against are:
- Angry car/truck drivers that suddenly turn homicidal when you cut them up, flip them off or beep/flash at them. There was some discussion of how to defend from this in this road rage thread.
- People pulling insurance scams by suddenly slamming on the breaks in attempt to get the driver behind to crash into you. I guess the obvious defence is to assume that all people in front of us are planning on slamming on their breaks in order to defraud insurance companies. The main defence I can think of is to always leave an adequate stopping distance and have a dash cam (incase they actually reverse).
Link to original page on YouTube.
I'm sure there's other things worth defending against. I haven't thought about it that much.