When: Mid-morning on a Sunday.

Where: A quiet and foggy country back road. We’re talking really quiet—one car every 20–30 minutes. And we’re talking pretty foggy—those cars are travelling carefully and at a moderate speed.

Who: Four blokes out for a long-ish ride. So they’re not belting along, just enjoying ride as best they can with lights on against the fog.

What: A small car approaches quickly from behind, horn blaring, comes up close to the riders then zooms past. Another 300m down the road, car stops right in the middle of the road. Cyclists pull up beside to ask if the driver is OK. She responds with a stream of abuse: they are selfish bastards, “taking up the whole road”, they “forced” her to overtake on the wrong side of the road at the top of a hill in the fog, blah, blah, blah. Cyclists naturally defend their right to be on the road but driver speeds up before braking heavily in front of them in an obvious attempt to cause them to crash. Driver then takes off and for good measure blasts horn angrily while zooming past another cyclist about a kilometre further down the road.

Why? This was a curious encounter on a number of points:

• A following driver is not “forced” to do anything by a vehicle or vehicles in front except to slow down and travel at a safe distance. This driver most certainly was not “forced” to overtake unsafely—she should have waited until it was safe. That’s a simple to understand road rule there—rule no. 140 to be precise: “A driver must not overtake a vehicle unless the driver has a clear view of any approaching traffic; and the driver can safely overtake the vehicle”.

• If was she was in such an urgent rush—maybe she was bleeding to death and needed to get to hospital—why did she have time to stop and remonstrate? Oh, turns out she wasn’t bleeding to death then. So she had time to slow down and overtake safely.

• Selfish bastardry: cyclists riding two abreast safely and legally (road rule 151); or driver hard-braking in an attempt to dislodge same cyclists? You decide.

• Venting anger at some other random stranger on a bike who wasn’t even there…?

The whole situation could have ended badly in a number of ways but was so easily avoided. As one of the four cyclists said to me, that driver was one very sad person with anger-management issues. I’ve noted before that in an encounter like this, the cyclist is not the aggressive driver’s real or only problem.

But that doesn’t make them any less of a danger on the road.