Cameras make you look for trouble

It was posted on a cycling forum that using a camera whilst cycling makes you look for trouble and that you are better off without them.

This response from the very well thought out MrOrigamist made me chuckle.

When they fitted flight data recorders (aka black boxes) to aircraft, pilots stated to behave differently. There were incidents of planes buzzing air traffic control towers, overshooting runways, doing loop the loops on the way to Malaga, playing chicken with each other, and worst of all, BA and Lufthansa Jumbo pilots would even engage in pretend dogfights over the channel. It’s madness, why do they persist with these flight data recorders when it’s obvious that pilots “instead of avoiding the accident…will have the tendency to go for it” same with cyclists, I suppose.


10 thoughts on “Cameras make you look for trouble

  1. It’s incredible, but some people are so stupid that they will actually believe such tongue-in-cheek comments.

  2. Yes, a very funny reply. However I’m afraid to say that having watched some of these videos by cyclists it does show a tendency towards 1) Over-reaction to driver maneuvers (e.g. the police car turning left after over taking a cyclist) 2) Aggressive behavior after being cut-up etc (e.g. chasing down the driver to tell them they are on camera) and 3) a tendency by the camera wearer to believe they are ‘policing the road’.

    I’m all for cameras being used but the cyclist must realise that they are not policing the roads. If the footage can be used to assist the police in an accident then great. If a genuine road traffic offence has been caught – then sure send to the police with details and let them deal with it – but don’t put yourself at risk by chasing the offender.

    VC

    1. Why do you assume that those characteristics you claim to observe have any causal link with the existence of a camera? Also, in what percentage of the videos you have looked at do you believe these tendencies are apparent? Was it a random sample?

      I think it quite rare in these videos for a cyclist to “chase down” the driver. Usually, the cyclist catch up at the next lights anyway. You do realise that when the cyclist goes really fast to catch up with the miscreant, that is usually fast-forward on the video. They aren’t really going that fast!

      1. ‘You do realise that when the cyclist goes really fast to catch up with the miscreant, that is usually fast-forward on the video. They aren’t really going that fast!’

        I sometimes wonder whether some people are smart-enough to realise that. However, confusion resulting from ‘fast-forwarding’ might possibly explain some of the virulent anti-cyclist rants about the dangers presented to pedestrians by pavement cycling.
        Back in the real-world, the dangers presented by cyclists to pedestrians pale into insignificance alongside that presented by cars, by virtue of KE and differential mass.

        1. I’ve had several people leave comments that I cycle too fast on sped-up footage. I’ve even put it in the description box. Or on screen “FFW” etc.

  3. His comment did make me grin 🙂 I get rather sick of the people who seem to think that having a camera means you look for trouble, I think it’s that we are more aware of what is going on around us so don’t ride around with the same blinkered view as the cyclists who are all to happy to accept poor driving that endangers their life as “normal”. In fact it was pretty much this that a colleague suggested when I was discussing my encounter this morning “You ride a lot, surely you must be used to it” when I mentioned a driver using his phone. I explained that I don’t see why I should accept bad driving as “the norm” and that what he was doing is actually illegal. Mind you I have seen this colleague driving whilst on his phone (and reported him to our manager) so I didn’t really expect much else.

    It was actually this mobile using driver who asked why I was recording, having already caught him doing an incredibly close pass and being on his phone at the next traffic lights (looking back on the footage he *may* have been on his phone when he did the pass but I can’t be certain….) My eloquent response of “To catch dickhead drivers like you” didn’t seem to go down to well…. 🙂

  4. Ha, awesome quote. I want quite the opposite with the cameras, I want fewer incidents. I picked the orange Drift HD170 camera, not the black one because I want it to be seen, hoping it might avert some potential incident if someone knows there is a camera.

  5. Great post. Thanks for sharing. Funny how using a camera suddenly makes all these things just happen as if they didn’t before the camera was used.

    Personally I prefer to not chase people down, rather I prefer to let the camera “do the talking” but where on the road engagement has taken place I will let the other person know they are being recorded if I feel threatened or I believe it will calm the situation. My experience has been in the main that they pull their heads once they realise they are being recorded.

    I have even in one instance simply pointed to my rear camera and had a female driver immediately back off and give safe distance.

    1. I’ll have you know that many hours of scripting, planning, casting, rehearsing, shooting and re-shooting, editing and post production goes into the creation of my videos! How dare you imply that they just happen!

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