My local area has a thriving community website mainly based around things such as recommendations for plumbers and restaurants, or people selling sofas. But every now and then I feel the need to scan its pages to make sure a near-neighbour hasn’t libelled me. Why?Cycling, of course.
As Jeremy Vinehas found out, there is something very peculiar about riding a bike. It seems to make otherwise sensible people on the roads around you lose all reason and perspective. Vine has spent years posting informative and amusing video vignettes of his bike commute, pointing out the many and frequent ways that some drivers seem oblivious or, at times, openly homicidal to those on two wheels.
The broadcaster is about as courteous and agreeable a cyclist as you could meet – Ionce joined himon his ride home – but he has finally given up sharing clips in the face of endless comments on X either insulting him or, fairly often, openly wishing him harm. Part of this is simply down to the depressingly grim culture of what used to be Twitter. But it is magnified by the way discussions about cycling inevitably bring out the worst in certain people.
I am not by any margin as well-known a bike advocate as Vine. But I havewritten a bookextolling the joys of everyday cycling, pluscolumns on the same subject. For some people, this is enough to make me the object of scorn or even hatred.
My irregular appearances on the local website began when the council started introducing so-called low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs), filtering schemes intended to make walking and cycling safer and more convenient. The fact Ihave arguedfor such schemes in principle was apparently enough to make me part of a conspiracy to force cars off the road and make cycling mandatory, in league with the council and a shadowy cabal of cycling advocacy groups.
When I was still a user of X, things were even more feral. Ostensibly serious and sane people, including a Labour councillor and the head of a respected campaign group, would argue that I was not simply wrong about bike lanes and LTNs, but that I knew this and was acting in bad faith.
So what is it about cycling? In part it’s sheer ignorance, given that even in most big UK cities, riding a bike is a fairly niche pursuit. To take one example, about twice a week I will have a driver asking (or yelling) about me riding “in the middle of the road”. If I did have the time and patience to explain, the response is simple. First, it’s the middle of thelane; and second, this is a very basic riding tactic recommended by everyone from the Highway Codeto the policeto disincentivise over-close passing when there is not enough room.
Similarly, much recent coverage of dangerous cycling is based on what are termed e-bikes – but with their throttles and powered speeds well above the legal maximum of 15mph, these are not bikes. They are illegal electric motorbikes.
Such antipathy, of course, takes places within a cultural context. For the UK – plus similar low-cycling countries such as the US and Australia – this is the concerted demonisation of bikes and cycling by everyone from the media to politicians. For certain newspapers and broadcast outlets, bike-bashing is a form of punching-down they can never get enough of. Cyclists are simultaneously so slow and obstructive that they hold up traffic, yet sufficiently rapid and reckless to be a major threat to pedestrians.
You can repeatedly point out,as doesthe saintly Chris Boardman, head of Active Travel England, that statistically cyclists are less deadly than lightning and cows – but as ever with culture wars, facts are somewhat futile here.
Speaking of culture wars, politicians play their part. Yes, we are thankfully beyond the slightly ridiculous peak of the Rishi Sunak era, when ministers commissioned a report intended to show LTNs didn’t work andsought to cover it upwhen the study found they did. But it is nonetheless notable that the first major intervention linked to cycling by Keir Starmer’s government was to use limited legislative bandwidth toannounce a planned new lawlast week targeting what parts of the media term “killer cyclists”.
No one becomes a saint when they start pedalling, and my long-held idea is that the very same people who zoom through a red light on a bike will also speed in a car, recline their seat as the meals are served on a plane or push past to get the last seat on a train. They are multi-modal nitwits.
But as Vine, and to a lesser extent myself, have found out, it is only when someone’s legs straddle a crossbar that they are somehow defined by their transport, and logic, reason and courtesy disappear. I’m not a “cyclist”. I just sometimes ride a bike. How hard is that to understand?
Peter Walker is senior political correspondent for the Guardian