For the past two years, one sentence has replayed in Benjamin Battisson's mind almost every day.
"I'm late for my lunch at the gallery."
These were the first words uttered to him by a distracted driver, as he lay injured on the asphalt, after she had suddenly turned in front of him while he rode his bicycle in the Parliamentary Triangle.
"I had no option other than to crash straight into that four-wheel-drive," Mr Battisson, who clocked more than 15,000 kilometres on his bike last year, said.
The sheer force of the impact destroyed his sternoclavicular joint, causing chronic nerve pain that shoots a "bolt of electricity" down his arm, leaving his fingers numb and shoulder unable to function.
Two and a half years of weekly physiotherapy, psychological counselling, and battles with insurance companies have followed. Meanwhile, the driver was "done and dusted" after paying a traffic fine.
Mr Battisson was one of thousands of cyclists in Canberra deeply shaken by the death of a 32-year-old woman on Thursday morning, when police said a car ploughed into a group of cyclists in Canberra's north.
"I was thinking about that poor woman. She was 32, that she was somebody's daughter ... and that could have been me," Mr Battisson said.
The victims of Thursday's fatal crash were part of the Bilbys Triathlon Club which the vice-president of the Canberra Cycling Club, Steve Crispin, described as their "second cousins, twice removed".
"We have six degrees of separation in this community. We all know someone who knows someone ... it is an enormous amount of sadness," Mr Crispin said.
He too is still recovering from injuries from a crash in February this year when a P-plater turned in front of him and he rode into the side of the vehicle.
He and Mr Battisson said the inconsideration towards cyclists was fuelled by a much larger, systemic cultural issue - the unconscious or conscious dehumanisation of people on bicycles, and the social acceptability of hating cyclists using the road.
"People don't drive expecting to see cyclists because they don't want to see cyclists, and that means that they don't pay attention," Mr Crispin said.
"When we learn to drive, there are some things that are instilled in us - look behind, do head checks. If it was instilled into us at that point that we should be looking out for cyclists and cyclists have an equal place on the road as cars, then there would be a culture of being wary of it."
Mr Crispin, a school teacher who teaches the "Road Ready" curriculum, said there had been at least five minor and major crashes reported by his cycling club members in the past year.
Following the fatal crash on August 27, Mr Battisson said he was reminded of instances where motorists hadn't paid attention to people cycling or in extreme cases saw them as a nuisance.
"I want people to think of the person that is riding a bike, because it is a person," Mr Battisson, who previously facilitated the ACT's "P-off" road safety program for young drivers, said.
"Any incident is catastrophic ... I don't think people understand the risk of their driving behavior, or the impact to them, maybe not physically, but mentally, of being responsible for that incident," Mr Battisson said.
Mr Battisson said when a car collided with a person on a bicycle, the rider paid with their body, their mental health, or their life and the driver, too, faced a life-altering sentence.
