Cyclists for a crackdown on cyclists

By Bagehot

THERE is crossness in the tight-knit world of groups campaigning for better bicycle paths in Britain, and other pro-cycling policies.

The cause? Reports that the government is looking with interest at proposals for a new Dangerous and Reckless Cycling Bill, creating a new offence of causing death by dangerous cycling.

The law is being pushed by a Conservative member of parliament on behalf of a family whose daughter was killed by a cyclist riding on the pavement in 2007. At the moment, there is no dedicated law to cover serious riding offences by people on bicycles.

Cycling groups retort that deaths caused by bicyclists are so rare that the new law is not needed: in the last year for which figures have been collated, 2009, no pedestrians were killed by cyclists, while 426 people on bicycles were killed by motor vehicles. Why not rein in the motorists, the cry has gone up. They are the killers, not the healthy, environmentally-friendly types on their cycles.

Bagehot is, as it happens, something of a cycle fanatic, who has commuted to work by bicycle on four continents. So I can appreciate the indignation felt by cycle campaigners. I feel the unequal risks run by cyclists as we are menaced each day by psychotic van drivers roaring past with an inch to spare, carved up by berks on loud-revving motorcycles, or forced to screech to a halt by a school-run mother in a four-wheel drive, drifting across three lanes of traffic while prodding at an iPhone and shouting at the ten-year-olds fighting in the third row of seats.

A near miss for a motorist is annoying and alarming. A near miss for a cyclist is a moment when death comes uncomfortably close, in the form of a ton or more of steel hurtling at your unprotected body.

But, for all that, I think the stance of the cycle campaign outfits is daft and wrong.

Broadly speaking, the world of London cycle commuting divides into two ideological camps, united only loosely by our yearning for better cycle lanes and fewer horrible drivers. There is a confrontational camp of eco-rebels on wheels who feel morally superior to carbon-belching motorists and sufficiently persecuted by motorised carriages of death that they have a right in self-defence to jump red lights, mount the pavement (and ride the wrong way up one way streets at night without lights while dressed all in black and listening to music on headphones).

Then there are square bikers like me, who sport multiple flashing lights, reflective vests and ride with their corduroys tucked into their socks (apologies for the mental image, but I fear it is true), and who stop at red lights and obey other traffic rules as a point of principle.

I want van drivers to stop trying to kill me as much as the next rider, but I don't think confronting them into good behaviour is likely to work. I want bicycling to become boringly normal and un-rebellious, so that you don't need Lycra and an attitude to take it up, and the roads become so infested with us that car drivers simply have to adapt to us and town halls realise that providing better cycle lanes might be a vote winner. I have ridden in countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands where cycling is a joy, and the secret is that grannies and men in suits are a part of the throng, and that glassy-eyed mother on the school run has her brood of children strapped into a bicycle built like a wheelbarrow, not a car built like a tank.

My route to work at The Economist is also used by lots of lone commuters in cars, many of them rather fast and powerful cars rumbling pointlessly in traffic jams, before roaring forwards at speed for, oh, 50 yards or so, when the way ahead clears. Do I think them twits? Yes, a bit. But I also own a car. Cycling to work is a choice for me, not an ideological act. I like bicycling, it is free, it is reasonable exercise, it does not rain as often as you would think, I know how long the journey will take and the Tube is horrid.

To take a slight detour, having my latest puncture repaired at a bike shop the other day (drinkers of London, the gutter is a bad place to drop your glasses), I saw a cycling shirt that appealed to me, which read “I pay road tax” and was decorated with a giant image of a round annual motor tax disc. I thought that was a fine argument for me: look, I pay the same taxes as you and own a car, I just happen to be on a bicycle right now. Please try not to run me over. Alas, when I Googled the shirt just now, it seems I had misunderstood its message: it is sold by a pressure group making the different point that roads are paid for out of general taxation, so that motorists should not criticise cyclists as free-riders. Still, a clever shirt.

Anyway, does the murderous cyclist bill sound like a slightly strange use of government time to me? Yes. Assuming the government is really thinking about this, do I imagine that the government is at least partly trying to placate car drivers infuriated by cyclists who have never hurt a pedestrian but who do think they can break traffic rules with impunity? Yes. Do I suspect that some of those infuriated drivers are hypocrites who think nothing of speeding through residential streets, jumping red lights or parking on the pavement? Probably.

If cyclists rarely kill pedestrians, as the campaigners correctly note, then the law will simply not be used very often, if ever. But—contrary to their protestations—that does not make it pointless.

If a showy new law weakens the public's sense that cyclists all believe they have the right to ride like selfish twits with impunity, then in some small way that may make drivers think of me as a legitimate road user. I felt the same when I saw a patrol of three policemen on bicycles on the Fulham Road last week, busting cyclists who had jumped a red light. I hope car drivers are watching, I thought. In some strange way, it may make them marginally more likely to give a cyclist a wider berth when overtaking, or think about cyclists when they screech out of a turning. And that will do for me.