November 11 2008, 71,500km

Using my car now for 2 weeks instead of the XJ to go to work. It's getting boring so I've begun a cdrom course Spanish while crawling in the traffic jam. Now I'm for the time being condemned to be a cager I can observe the lane splitting bikers very well too. I always notice them rather late, most of the time they're already within a few meters of my car. And that while I'm more or less on the look out for them. It doesn't matter if they have extra bright lights (xenon) of have a loud pipe: they're invisible until being quite close. I always thought using the blinkers as alarmlights was rather useless, but I experience now that it does help a little bit to notice the biker a bit earlier. Valuable lessons for me when I -at last- can use the bike myself again: as biker you're hardly noticed no matter you do, so stay alert and drop your speed.
On the other hand a lot of my fellow cagers (grrrr...) do try to make way when they notice a biker but some are blind for everything and will block the bikers unintentionally.