Video: Aussie road rage driver pulls knife on cyclist

When will this kind of road rage become as unacceptable as drunk driving is today? (& if you believe drunk driving's still a problem, yes, you're right but I can recall a time when being drunk was accepted as a mitigating circumstance following an accident!) It's about time road rage became a serious offence in & of itself, even if there's no subsequent injury/damage, with **very** long bans to keep such dangerous people off the road until they're no longer threats.

In this case, one look at the car - the huge roo bars, all those spotlights - should be enough to alert anyone to the fact the driver's a crazy & probably needs to be kept away from the rest of humanity until his testosterone levels stop interfering with his thought processes.

I thought Oz's were ok but turns out they are getting angrier at cyclists when driving.

And his saddle was too low! 

I suppose what we never see are the occassions a twat jumps out of his car, threatens a cyclist, and the said cyclist batters him - for obvious reasons, it's just not the sort of thing that gets uploaded! It's a shame really, because the message that's being reinforced everytime a video like this appears is that cyclists are, by and large, a weedy bunch that are easily intimitaded.

Mad Max indeed.

See you on the road,  Skag!

We really need one or more cyclists with professional optical expertise to analyse the videos to support these victims with video evidence. This was a very close pass, much closer than it seems in the video, because of the optical characteristics of the cameras used.

I rather suspect that the Police are likely to lack the expertise in properly analysing video-camera footage because the footage appears deceptively similar ro what might have been seen with the naked eye. This is vitally important, because footage can be misused easily whether wilfully or incompetently to undermine a cyclist's statement as being exaggerated.

It's extremely difficult for someone who lacks proper training to assess exactly how close these vehicles approached, based upon such video footage. These cameras use ultra wide-angle / fish-eye lenses – to capture as much of the scene as possible and to ensure enormous depth of field (keeping everything in focus that is more than a short distance from the lens).

As an example, my Contour Roam2 HD Action Camera offers a 170 degree field of view - a fisheye lens.

The most crucial aspect to using cycling videos as evidence is that such lenses greatly exaggerate (distort) apparent perspective and when compared with the naked-eye, greatly increase the fall-off in angular size of objects as the object's distance from the lens increases. There is at least one video on YouTube where a car hits the handlebar of a bicycle, but despite this the car looks close, but doesn't look dangerously close.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKNuX_4jGsc

A hint that such a lens is being used is when barrel distortion is seen (straight objects that cross the field of view, appear increasingly curved* towards the edge of the scene [*as long as they don't pass through the lens' optical axis / centre]). 

This injustice needs to be addressed.

Luckily for the rider he has the benefit of Australia's compulsory helmet laws to keep him safe!

The attraction of Oz gets greater every week.

So what exactly was the driver fined for? Surely threatning behaviour with a weapon would attract much harsher penalty, right?

The cowardly little shit-bag should have been jailed and his licence revoked for life. The public are not safe with that aggressive  low-life being allowed to wander at large. He's only capable of being a man when he's got a weapon in his hand. He obviously doesn't have the mental furniture to be in charge of a motor vehicle never mind a lethal weapon.

Scary but how cool are the details on the guy's head cam.

actually thinking about it again - similar to the cretin that took a baseball bat to the lad in London earlier this week with far worse driving that this...take their cars. Take their cars and crush them with them watching then charge them for the disposal of the waste and make it clear that driving a ton of metal and plastic at 60kph is a privilege , not a right and one that is only afforded to people that dont exhibit psychotic behaviour.

Maybe the answer is for WA cyclist to go full Mad Max...ditch the water bottle and carry a crowbar and let anyone that gets that close again pay for it in bodywork repairs. 

Ok turning off the irony setting...what's the answer? The law doesn't protect us, having a cam which macho, SUV-driving f##kwit with a knife wasn't bright enough to spot doesn't protect us? I hear the PP comments and ack making sudden moves is a non-smart move - but NO-ONE is looking out for us except ourselves. 

The fact that this prick thinks his crappy jeep is worth more than hospitalisation or potential death of another human being is the heart of this problem. #sadness

The driver should be in prison and banned from driving (and carrying a knife) for life.

The cyclist should really reconsider his technique for dealing with impatient motorists overtaking unsafely, which he himself describes as follows, "I was able to fend off most with a strong position and, if necessary, a slight sudden movement further out." The "strong position" is fine, but the "sudden movement" is just a phenomenally bad idea. One of the reasons for riding well clear of the verge/kerb is so that you can hold a steady line and not have to swerve about to avoid most potholes and sunken drains. And in the video his last-second change of road position wasn't so slight, in my opinion. It absolutely does not excuse any of the driver's actions, but just in case anyone reading this thinks that is the way to ride safely: no, no, no, no, a thousand times no.

Just to reiterate, the driver is clearly a psychopath, the cyclist seems to be a slightly foolish man harming nobody except potentially himself, and any justice system that hands out merely a fine in a case such as this is a bad joke. But that's just my opinion, I don't want to start a pointless belligerent argument, I'm sure a certain someone will be along soon to do that.

Can't you get a bigger fine than that for not having a bell on your bike in Australia. 

Driving a huge SUV, carrying a big knife with him with which he makes ninja moves. He is THE man!!!!

The fine is indeed silly. But they have the Crocodile Dundee there (you know "That's not a knife, this a knife"), so carrying tactical knives in Australia must be a manhood ritual.

It was bad driving, then an unacceptable degree of anger from the driver, who was in the wrong. That should be punished, but then wielding a knife like that should lead to a prison sentence.

The fact that there is no consequence for these actions leads people to conclude (rightly) that it's the wild west out there on the roads, and the most angry and violent person will win.

If I pulled a knife on a cop or a judge I'd get jail time. Simple as.

Fine will actually hurt him. That's about 750 quid. If it happened here he'd probably just get a caution and that'd be the end of it.

Pathetic how the legal system treats situations like this. Fine should be bigger with some of that fine going to the cyclist as comp, and the rest to the police to cover their costs in handling it.

I don't know which is more outrageous - the driver's homicidal actions, or the pathetic penalty he received for them.

Australia looks like a truly awful place to be a cyclist.  Again.