Re: Right approach to dangerous driver behavior? - Cycling Mob: Road Cycling, Mountain Biking and More

08-12-2003, 08:49 PM

"Dan Cosley" wrote ...
> I've been having a larger-than-usual number of unpleasant-to-
> potentially-dangerous encounters with motorists recently. This
> involves verbal stuff, which usually I can shrug off. However,
> it also sometimes involves being cut off or squeezed off the
> road, and this I find harder to just let go. I'm trying to
> train myself to get license/vehicle numbers rather than just
> be scared, but:
>
> 1) Is it worth getting license numbers of cars? Trucks?
> 2) What else (if anything) do you do about bad driver behavior?
>
> -- Dan

Along with the notepad, carry a cell phone. If you can give a calm,
objective description of the incident immediately after it happened, making
it pretty obvious that some traffic law was violated, you have a much better
chance of persuading the police to act. Use some discretion here. If the
incident is over and done with and you are no longer in any danger, calling
911 will be counterproductive. In this case, call the non-emergency phone
number for your county's police/fire/ambulance dispatch center. I have
numbers in my cell phone directory for state, county, and various local law
enforcement agencies just for this kind of thing.

With commercial vehicles, a call to the business can be very effective.
Vehicle numbers can be more useful than license numbers if the business is
big enough to own several vehicles. If you can't get a vehicle number or
license number, sometimes a description of the vehicle along with location
of the incident and time of day will let the employer deduce which driver
was involved. If the company takes this sort of thing seriously, they will
call you back and ask questions trying to get a clearer picture of what
happened.
--
mark