Are you a ‘good’ cyclist or a ‘bad’ cyclist? Is the Highway Code tucked safely in your rucksack as you give way at dotted lines, signal to change lanes and wait for a full green light before setting off at junctions? Or do you speed aggressively down narrow pavements, throwing toddlers and old ladies aside before bullying Landrovers out of the way on roundabouts?
These terms and definitions aren’t my own you understand – in my view ‘the urban cyclist’ should be held up as a national treasure and given that spare plinth on Trafalgar Square – but over the past eighteen months or so we have seen quite a backlash against cycling, with so-called rogue elements in the two-wheeled community accused in newspaper columns, radio phone-ins – and even parliament – of creating anarchy on the streets and ‘giving all of us a bad name’.
Personally, I’m a right goody-two-shoes when I’m out on my bike. The training I had at school is still firmly in my head, and I’ll sit at a deserted traffic light at midnight for five whole minutes without even thinking of going through on red. The only illicit thing I do on a regular basis is cycling at 3mph across Primrose Hill early in the morning. This is because the alternatives are taking a huge detour, going the wrong way down a one-way street or climbing a very steep and unnecessary hill. I go so slowly because the only other people there at that time are walking unpredictable tiny dogs.
I’m in favour of more cycle routes across parks in general. With a sensible speed limit, there’s no reason I can see why bikes and pedestrians can’t coexist happily on a path of reasonable width. It’s no different than expecting us to share a canal towpath, and at least in the park there’s no scary water hazard to worry about.
This puts me at odds with the curiously well-funded ‘Heath for Feet’ campaign, which puts out half-page adverts in my local paper most weeks opposing any increase in cycle routes on Hampstead Heath. They seem to think of bikes in parks the way I would think of a Jeep Cherokee driving on the pavement.
Recent scrutiny has prompted me to check out what the cyclists I know are actually doing these days. Are they ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and what do they think of the criticism we’re getting? Out on the road, I do see people cycling in ‘bad’ ways. But it’s not easy to stereotype them. For every couple of twenty-something males who speed past a red light shouting out to me, ‘Lights are for cars!’, I witness the same number of women – young or old, in full cycle gear or their Sunday best – breaking basic rules. And for every badly behaved cyclist, I see many more car drivers breaking the speed limit, blocking cycle lanes, or cutting one of us up while talking on their phones.
At my local ‘Green Book Club’ an interesting philosophy emerged when I asked about the issue. It all depends, it turns out, on whether you think of yourself as a ‘pedestrian on wheels’ or a ‘car without an engine’. This makes perfect sense: I’m clearly one of the latter, obeying the signs and road markings intended for cars as if I was driving a Micra not perched on a Brompton. But others, who perhaps haven’t ever driven a car, see their bikes not as a vehicle but as an extension of themselves, and can’t imagine pushing their bike anywhere they could be riding it.
I’ve only been cycling in London for a couple of years but feedback from pioneer cyclists – who started out alone long before there were monthly Critical Mass rides, the London Cycling Campaign, or any political will to support cycling – shows that they had to develop a more robust approach to ‘sharing the road’. In the face of hostility from almost everyone in a car or van, they took to mounting pavements just to stay alive and, despite improved conditions and much more awareness of cyclists now, this attitude survives in many today.
The Greens on the London Assembly have what amounts to a veto over the Mayor’s annual budget, which needs a two-thirds majority to go through. Every year they negotiate a long list of concessions and, this year, these included cash for Transport for London and the Met to run a ‘Share the Road’ campaign promoting mutual respect among road users to improve safety.
The campaign finally launched this autumn and I was a little shocked to see the results. A batch of campaign posters went up on bus stops that seemed to play right into the hands of the ‘stop the evil cyclists’ brigade: “STOP AT RED” they said, warning cyclists not to run red lights.
I didn’t really like the tone of these ads. Simply telling us what a red light means won’t change the overall mindset of a cyclist who thinks of themselves as a slightly quicker pedestrian. I think that, rather than lecturing cyclists on individual rules of the road, a campaign that set out a simple new philosophy for all road users to bear in mind would be more effective. There is an existing hierarchy of personal transport, used by planners, that places pedestrians at the top, followed by cyclists, with car drivers below both. Something like a reprise of the famous Frost Report sketch, where each traveller outlines how they ‘know their place’ and gives examples of things they do to behave appropriately, would surely be better received than the current campaign?
However, the obvious bristling that I and other cyclists have felt at ‘Share the Road’ may be an over-reaction. It’s quite likely that clever media placement means we just haven’t noticed the parts of the campaign aimed at making drivers respect cyclists too.
Another, less reported, aspect of ‘Share the Road’ has been a blitz on cars parking in cycle lanes and driving up to those advanced stop lines for bikes at traffic lights. This has seen hundreds of fines issued to drivers in central London this year, particularly in Westminster. I am also assured that the next phase of the campaign will aim to improve respect for cyclists among lorry drivers, and that the ads will be mainly placed in the Sun. Accidents between lorries and cyclists are responsible for far more deaths than collisions between cyclists and pedestrians, so let’s hope it works.
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