Overtaking cyclists

Riding a m/cycle round the outskirts of London as I do the thing that gets me about so many cyclists is their utter lack of situational awareness. They're often even worse than pizza delivery kids on mopeds.

An example that really wound me up was some cyclist tailgating me as I went down the oustide of a traffic queue. Coming the other way was a couple of cyclists and a car attempting to go past them, so I stopped and merged into the queue so the oncoming car wouldn't feel pushed towards the cyclists alongside him. The cyclist behind me overtakes and the car coming the other way nearly squashes his fellow cyclists...

Something I used to do in my days of rider training was say "OK, hands up who thinks you should bear in mind the possibility of someone coming the wrong way down a one way street towards you?" and no hands would go up. Followed by "OK, hands up who's seen someone going the wrong way down a one way street?" at which point nearly every hand would go up (its a long time since I've seen this happen so I guess road marking and layout must have improved considerably over the years).

Anyway, the point was made. Expect the unexpected and unlikely and nearly impossible, because you spend so much time on the road that its going to happen sooner or later. From what I can see most multi car traffic accidents are caused by *both* parties doing something they've got away with hundreds of times before, but when two not-quite-careful-enoough actions meet you get the accident. And of course its why both parties think they're innocent, its always if s/he hadn't done that there wouldn't have been an accident...

Well if there's one thing I did notice it was the motorcyclists seemed a lot more placid than 10 or so years ago.  A sign of the times maybe.... core bikers are still on motorbikes, they were probably the road aware ones anyway, but city bonuses for dicks-with-a-deathwish only stretch to a Wilier or Bianchi these days, so Kawasaki crotch rockets are out.