Witnessing road rage and bike rage on a Brompton.

Yesterday after work I nipped out for an errand that was at the tail end of rush hour  - what is left of it during the current situation we find ourselves in. I had been scrabbling around to try and find a couple of power supplies for a PC that had died.  Sadly I was to witness another incident where no road user really comes off that well. (I am sure that all major cities have incident like this every day but sadly they seem to be on the rise here in London).

To cut a long story short, the economic version was that I was sitting at the front of the traffic lights waiting for them to turn green. A cyclist was roughly 5m behind me. A car coming to a halt was too close to the cyclist and made contact with his rear wheel. (A rather stupid thing to do). The cyclist - understandably - was not best pleased and started calling the motorist a few choice names. Motorist takes exception to this and had apparently apologised while still in the car but got out and the two had a slanging match there and then. I have seen something like this a few times before.

With a few cars behind beeping the lights went from red to green and back to red and they were still at it. I got off my Brompton (Orange, Black Special Edition) and went over to them to try and calm things down a little appealing to their better nature that it wasn't really worth it.

The cyclist cycled off through the red light and was gone. Back on my bike, with the lights green I cycled off too, with the motorist following. Not far down the road the motorist was parked up and when I passed he beeped and gestured for me to come over. I stopped and chatted through open windows. He actually apologised to me and thanked me for trying to sort things out. I said that I would probably have been annoyed too if that had of happened to me and may have said something as back as well. I said that getting angry like that just wasn't worth it and that like it or not we're all on the same team - using the road.

Not sure how you would reacted in this situation if you had of been the motorist making a stupid error and not paying attention or being the cyclist on the receiving end? I do think that it is all too easy to see red but invariably it won't help.

What you you think?

Stay safe out there people.