What is the right response when a driver cuts you off, given that anger is not it?

In the moment, the entire priority is getting out of the situation safely, and everything else is a distraction from that.

Concretely:

• Keep moving. Stopping in a live lane to have an argument puts you stationary in traffic, which is more dangerous than what just happened.
• Look around, not at the driver. The vehicle that cut you off is now a known quantity. The one you have not seen is the risk.
• Brake and steer before anything else. Shouting takes breath and attention you may need.
• Do not chase. Nothing good has ever come from catching up to a car to explain something.

The hard part is that adrenaline arrives after the danger has passed, so the urge to react peaks at exactly the moment reacting is least useful. Knowing that in advance genuinely helps.

The positional advice that reduced these events most for me, and it is counter-intuitive: ride further out.

Hugging the kerb feels safer and invites exactly the close pass and the left hook. Taking a clear position in the lane — far enough out that overtaking requires a genuine manoeuvre — means drivers either wait or move fully across. It feels more exposed for the first week and then you notice it has stopped happening as often.

The other one is eye contact at junctions. A driver waiting to pull out who has looked at you is a very different proposition from one who has not, and you can usually tell within a second which you are dealing with.

Afterwards, the useful question is whether this was a near miss or an incident, because they deserve different responses.

Near miss — no contact, no injury. Realistically: let it go, and instead ask whether anything about your position made you less visible. Not because it was your fault, but because that is the only variable you control. A lot of close passes happen where a rider is far enough left to be treated as not really in the lane.

Incident — contact, damage, injury, or driving dangerous enough that the next cyclist may not be lucky. Then: get the registration, get the location and time, get witnesses if any stopped, and report it. Many police forces now accept video submissions and act on them.

Which brings up the camera question. A rear-facing camera changes what you can do after an incident from nothing to something, and it also — in my experience — changes your own behaviour, because you know you will watch it back.

On the shouting: the one thing worth keeping from that instinct is noise as a warning rather than as a comment.

A loud shout or a bell before the manoeuvre completes can genuinely stop a driver who has not seen you. That is useful. A shout afterwards is communication with somebody who is already past you and can only escalate.

So the version I have settled on is: be loud early, silent late. It uses the same reflex for something that occasionally works.