Die, SUV drivers

I cycled up from Ballinascarthy in West Cork where my brother and his fiancée and their young child live this weekend.
The cycle down the day before had been reasonably pleasant, nothing like the fantasy I may have derived of cycling in rural Ireland from reading Molloy or The Third Policeman but pretty pleasant all the same.
Coming back wasn’t so nice. I was a lot more tired, the weather wasn’t so nice with an unusual easterly wind blowing, and the battery on my mp3 player had gone flat. There’s a stretch of road close to the end of the journey where I’ve often got so tired that I start to hallucinate that the road is going down instead of up.
I’m clearly not that fit, as it’s only a journey of about 30 miles and I met people who were travelling 2 or 3 times that distance every day. One “Canadian” I in Vietnam met told me he was travelling 100km a day which is about 62 miles in real distance. He told me he was aiming to get to Nepal, but I put a bit of a downer on his plans by explaining the situations in Burma and Tibet.
Nonetheless, it would still have been a reasonably nice cycle if the government ever lifted one of it’s stupid fat fingers to help cyclists. You’d think they’d have somewhat of an incentive to do so as we are one of the worst countries in the EU for implementing the Kyoto accord, probably because Mary Harney thinks Kyoto is a Korean town that Intel might re-locate to if we don’t bring down our corporation taxes even lower.
Our government’s neglect of cyclists is atypical by European standards. In countries like Holland and Germany there are thousands of miles of cycle path which means that older people whose reflexes and depth of vision may be compromised are able to cycle.
Here, you really need your wits about you to cycle, and if Flann O Brien or Beckett were writing their novels today, they’d be a lot shorter because their protagonists would be run over by an SUV.
Ah, SUVs. Bane of my life; polluting my air, taking up all the space on the roads; mysteriously, a couple of nights ago one owner was sitting outside my window for an hour in a particularly tank-like model with the engine running. It seemed like a crazy, inexplicable thing to do but no more than buying an SUV in the first place.
I was reading about a far-right American film festival organised by right-wing nutters who fear that Hollywood is controlled by liberal jews (I’d love if that were true) where one of the participants came out with something like: “So what if we invaded Iraq for their oil? We need their oil”
This is the way SUV owners think. They figure they must “need” a big car because there are so many other big cars out there that they’ll get killed if they get into a collision with another one while driving a small car, though god knows if they wanted to experience real danger they should try cycling. It’s the same philosophy that underlines American gun laws. It also leads to America attacking oil-rich nations so their people are slightly more safe from other Americans.
In a sane society SUV owners would be pariahs in the same way that paedophiles are now. Instead celebrities like Jay Leno and Schwarzneger boast about how big their cars are. Unfortunately it’s getting to be the same way here, and conscious of their reputation as the “Party on” party, Fianna Fail are doing piss-all to check this disturbing trend, unlike our more responsible neighbours in Britain and Italy where they make their owners pay top Euro to drive them into urban areas.
Last time I cycled down to West Cork I parked by the side of road to adjust my mp3 player and a middle-aged SUV owner blew his horn at me really loudly to warn me how dangerous it was to be listening to music when there were nutters like him on the road. Then I was cycling up last Sunday I stopped at that chip shop on the road from Bandon to Inishannon to get something to drink and noticed an SUV parked there with a family inside that were stuffing themselves with chips and their complexions suggested this wasn’t a rare occurrence. It led me to the melancholy thought that money can buy you lots of things, but not taste. Even worse was to come when I got past Inishannon and an SUV with two shaven-headed chavs drove up really close to me and blew their horn really loud and seeing my annoyance stopped long enough to gloat at my misery, though it was long enough for me to get their registration number. This sort of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in a civilised society, but in Celtic Tiger Ireland I wouldn’t even bother my arse trying to report them to the authorities.
The fact that people are even allowed drive these monsters at a young age is a fucking disgrace. There are more statistics than you can shake a stick at which prove that most accidents are caused by males under the age of 25, and more to show that people are more likely to die in a collision with an SUV than a fuel-efficient car. Recently there’s been a report that suggests that the reason males under the age of 25 kill so many people on the is that the part of their brain that deals with risk assessment isn’t fully developed. When there’s similar research about Marajuana the government wheels it out triumphantly as “Proof” that it’s draconian drug policies make sense, but with a report like this they shrug their shoulders and think about making some more TV ads.
It’s not all doom and gloom for cyclists though, as our government has signed over a lot of law-making powers to Brussels, which isn’t always a bad thing, as the EU are proposing a law which makes drivers liable in any collision with a cyclist. How great would it be if that law got passed? Then you could cycle out in the middle of the road in front of SUVs and there’d be nothing they could do to stop you.
Then they’d know what it was like to be treated with such disrespect.
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