Blocked Filter
Lessons Learned; Filtering on a motorway at night
There are some excellent sites on the Internet to help get you by with your riding. Many of them have helped me really think about cornering safely, wet and windy weather riding, preparing for a journey, and on how to filter.
There are debates, [ LINK ], and lessons, [ Excellent LINK ]but until you are faced with motorway traffic in crisis you just can't imagine how dangerous things can get.
This week I was tired (from being poorly earlier. Ahhhhh). So, I thought it'd be easier and safer to nip down the M3 than to tip-toe through the dark countryside and it's give me an opportunity to plasma-rise London's finest overnight escapologists.
Things started badly; there was a snarl up getting onto the M3 from the A331; some shopping incident involving the WI a few miles on, apparently. Anyway, I was already struggling with resisting the urge to aggressively nip down the inside, and I can't struggle for long when I'm tired and grouchy and soon learned the car punters don't use their near-side mirrors much, even with an ST1300 firing off the brightest light sen since the Millennium Falcon went into hyperdrive with the trash. Oops.
Later the traffic began to slow. The second link above makes it clear that you shouldn't really attempt to filter in traffic above 40mph; a 20:20 rule. But when the traffic is changing speed across 3-lanes between 20 and 50mph it makes judging when it's safe to filter or when you've just made an illegal overtake.
From, http://www.motorcycle-training.f2s.com/filtering.htmlAt one point a truck on my left in the middle of 3 lanes was cat-and-mousing me in the outside lane where I was stumped from progress by a white van man (could have been black, mixed, or other - it was dark and hard to tell) who was hanging over the lines to block me off. The truck backed off; I took this to be an invitation so mirrored, signalled, death-checked my left quarter and looked forward into a face full of Transit door and brake light. I had to break left - but now in those split few seconds I was unsure of whether the truck would be catching up, passing, or still backed off. In other words I overtook on the near-side at 40mph without a clue what was a hazard or not except for the conviction I was going to hit "something". Hmm. The back of a Transit or the front of a moving Truck. I was a dick; but a lucky dick.
Later, the traffic came to fair halt about 2-miles short of this evening's obstruction, a fair multiple-car pile up off the M3 to M27 junction with blue and yellow lights flashing all over the place and traffic filtering in from 2 wide motorway lanes zipping together into one dog-legged lane around the cordoned off debris. Tricksy, to claim the least. I chickened out for a rest at his point with the excuse to rejoin my reflective jerkin across my chest and to let a fellow bike pas me in case he recognised I was, by now, getting a little timid. Fine for him on his 500cc Suzuki, a quick nip at 90-degrees through the queues and he was on his way. I waited in line. (Caught and passed him soon after though as the HID lamp was making a higher mph possible in the mixed traffic through the darkness of the Hamble crossing and on.)
Anyway, I've learned something. Don't be cocky. There's a difference between filtering stationery traffic through town and moving combative traffic on the motorway.
As an explanation mark to the evening (that took 1hr 45min!) I saw a dickhead red car driven by a schoolboy-aged prat race down the outer lane of the dual carriageway entering Fareham, speed up to the last car in a line of traffic slowing for the A27 / A32 junction, and then - instead of dropping in behind the last car - try to slot in front of the last car. The 60-year-old plus driver of this other car couldn't have either seen or anticipated dickhead and was nearly rammed off the road over the parapet; dickhead then left him for dead and repeated the exercise 5-cars down the line. I rode past him with deliberate slowness and gave the twat a long and hard Paddington stare. There's a good argument for allowing us to carry weapons on our daily commute - there'd be a few less dickheads left on the roads that way.
Care what I say, though. Earlier I had clearly been a dickhead dueling with a truck and a van. Some reflection is called for here I think.
More Filtered Links
Discussing filtering mishaps
About legality
YouTube video I watched this before I even took my CBT - excellent information.
The video - more study for me, I think
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