Last week's blog was back to "normal", I made some comments about cycle lanes and there were lots of comments.

Some of these were reasonable and rational and some were from the anti-cycling brigade who will always rant on with uninformed and flawed arguments!

Actually I quite like a healthy discussion with different viewpoints being represented. I'm not quite so keen on some of the petty insults and sulking, but at least people are taking an interest.

The last week has been an interesting one for me in terms of cycling; there were two stories in the paper that provoked a lot of discussion.

One related to the new Toucan crossing being installed on Boundary Road and the other about a cyclist winning compensation following a crash with a temporary sign.

The one that surprised me the most was the compensation story. I am not going to make any comment on the story and whether this was right or wrong as I don't know the details of the incident, but I do hope that there isn't a knee jerk reaction that causes any issues around closure of cycle routes.

We live in a society that seems very quick to seek compensation and appoint blame for accidents and injury, the downside to this is the over bearing health and safety culture that has emerged as a result.

My experiences on the bike over the last week have been very varied; I dug out the mountain bike and got muddy on Saturday which was great fun; it's been far too long since I've been out so I'm hoping to carry on!

My commuting over the last week has been pretty much exclusively on the road, due to the bad weather of last weekend the seafront has been very sandy so I decided to give the councils a few days to try and clear the area before I attempted to ride along there again.

The downside has been having to ride with the traffic and for some reason there have been some appalling displays of driving.

From my observations of last week there seem to be two main reasons for bad driving where cyclists are involved.

1. Lack of observation and planning - I often see cars blocking junctions or trying to overtake cyclists when there is a queue ahead or no gap to pull in to. I can only guess that this is caused by drivers not looking beyond the end of their bonnet and the desperation to overtake the cyclist without any regard for what else is happening around them.

2. Impatience - Cyclists do not slow drivers down more than a few seconds, if at all. My average speed on the road is pretty much the same as most cars around town, but still some people are insistent on trying to get past.

I ask one simple question: Would it kill you to wait for five seconds so that it's clear and safe to overtake me? No, it wouldn't, but not waiting might kill me!