Re: A short one... almost brought me to a state of raod rage.
Seemed to have had a car deliberately block me from passing. Really pissed me off. Would it have pissed you off?
Not at all. Interesting behaviour that could be down to a lot of things. Often, in the UK we have a lane split like that on inclines - the outer lane is regarded as a passing lane to allow faster traffic to move past vehicles slowed down by the gradient. Many drivers do not understand this, and assume that if they are not slow, they have to stay out of the inside lane. Probably just ignorance on their part - and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I mean that they don't know.
People pass a driving test, and then never bother to remind themselves or to take on board new information. Many people passed a basic maths test at some point in their lives, but they can no longer give an instant answer to the question 'what is 7 times 8'.
However, that is not to say that some people don't deliberately block overtaking. It is quite interesting, and would form an interesting psychology thesis: There are drivers who move over for you to pass; there are drivers who accelerate to close the gap that you will move into after your overtake; there are drivers who will move across to prevent you from overtaking in the first place; there are male and female drivers; there are solo drivers and drivers with front seat passengers. Choose a couple of these and you can deduce some revealing correlations. I won't hint at my own conclusions, but I reckon that Sigmund Freud would have had much to say on the topic.
We have a more worrying phenomenon over here too. 'Crash for Cash', where an accident is engineered by one or two cars in order to force an unsuspecting driver into a collision which is deemed to be their fault. IN the cities near where I live in West Yorkshire, we have the highest rate for this in the country. It makes me pretty wary, and I try to keep a cool head whatever is going on. One of these is to engineer a situation where the driver behind gets a little too close. A common trick is for the driver in front to annoy the driver behind by alternately accelerating and decelerating, so that the car behind feels the need to get past. The car behind sees the opportunity, gets in close and the lead driver slams on the brakes. The lead car has modified the brake lights so that they don't always come on.
Another trick is to trap a car waiting to emerge into the main road. The car approaching the junction on the main road flashes headlights - which is commonly thought of as an indication that the waiting car can pull out. But the car on the main road deliberately ploughs into the side of the emerging car.
It is all very worrying for a biker, and convinces me to keep the being annoyed feelings well under control. Are they not paying attention, are they being deliberately provocative or are they luring me into a trap ? Yes, I will get mildly irritated by a vehicle behaving like that, but it will never entice me to pass on the inside (illegal in the UK in that situation), or to do anything else hastily. It's much more interesting to watch the behaviour of a car from a distance. I always wear a high viz jacket. I always wear a white helmet - its impossible to buy a helmet in my size that isn't a plain colour, and that usually means white. I ride a motorbike that has its headlights on all of the time (in the UK and Europe, headlights now have to come on with the ignition). In the rear view mirror, it is difficult to tell what colour the bike is behind the headlight.
Stay well back, match their speed, keep calm, let them see you - take the wide line through corners as you would normally, so you appear in different mirrors - its surprising how much calming influence you can have on erratic driving behaviour that this image in the rear view mirror has.
Which is exactly what you were doing, and I suspect why they eventually moved over !
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