Originally Posted by
JoeyBike
Last time I checked (yesterday in fact) trucks, buses, even cars can't move sideways very well in heavy traffic. So...being NEXT to them, not BETWEEN their bumpers, is the safest position to cycle in order to not become the bologna in a car/truck sandwich. On a hill or bridge I would not want to be behind some giant wheeled "lorry" as it rolls backward waiting for the clutch to engage.
Did I misunderstand your post?
It would depend what's going on.
In London there have been a few cases of cyclists squashed between a turning lorry and roadside barriers because they got into a position where they couldn't escape and the lorry driver couldn't see they were there. I vaguely recall an incident some years ago where the lorry driver didn't even know he had crushed a cyclist so badly they died - he hadn't seen them because they were in a blind spot, the lorry was big enough that presumably he couldn't feel any feedback to tell him something was wrong, so he had no way of knowing.
Nowadays a lot of larger vehicles carry warnings on the back to tell cyclists not to pass on the inside, or to be careful passing on the inside. A lot of lorries now have a lot more mirrors than they used to - IIRC one of the bosses of a haulage firm was sufficiently concerned that his drivers could literally kill another road user and not even know they had done it that he ordered his fleet to be fitted with enough mirrors that cyclists couldn't disappear into blind spots.
Ideally I'd want to be in front of a heavy lorry, failing that I'd be far enough behind that I wouldn't get squashed if it rolled backwards on a hill. Beside it just seems like a bad place to be however you wrap it up - if the driver doesn't see me and moves across to let oncoming traffic pass, or turns, or does anything else then I've got nowhere to go.