Bike Monopoly 22: Chance 2 of 3

We've selected "Drunk in Charge" Fined £20 as our second Chance.

Under the Licensing Act 1872 (we learn from bikeforall.net's handy guide to cycling and the law) it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a bike. Just as it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a cow, and we certainly wouldn't condone such drink-driving. But it seems the law is never enforced.

More recently, the Road Traffic Act of 1988 makes it illegal to cycle on a road or in a public place if 'unfit to ride... that is... incapable of having proper control' though drink or drugs.

You can't be breathalysed or asked for a sample, any more than a pedestrian or horse can. So - as long you have proper control of your bike - you can enjoy a drink or two and cycle home.

Combination locks can be useful here. If you're too drunk to remember the combination, or to be able to work the fiddly barrels, you're not fit to be cycling anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm
(a) off soon to cycle in Poland, where the penalties for drunk cycling are somewhat bizzarely the same as for drunk driving - so better go by car if you're thinking of a heavy session, cycling could be dangerous with all those pissed drivers - and
(b) going to set up a bar called Moderation, so that I can truthfully tell the doctor I only drink in Moderation.

Sober as a judge? Not in Poland

Poland's Constitutional Court, according to the BBC, has just confirmed that it thinks they should punish drunken cyclists with the same severity as drunken drivers.

I wish! If only I was as dangerous after half a Black Sheep!

Then I could mow down with my bike that idiot driver of the TfL-registered hire car, registration number HJ54KNW in case you're interested, who unquestionably tried to knock me off my bike last night because he took exception to the way someone else was cycling...

I could crush the moron taxi driver we saw two minutes later at the junction at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge who dangerously undertook a woman on a bike who was cycling exactly where she should have been and was signalling so clearly it must have been visible from Mars...

I could vaporise the lunatic woman bus driver murderously busting the lights at Churchyard Row just south of the Elephant and Castle tonight... (How refreshing to know that lethal, stupid aggression is no longer the exclusive domain of men!)

Except, of course, I couldn't. At all.

Because, as all of us who enjoy a drink in moderation from time to time and cycle know, the bike has a built-in breathalyser.

If you're pissed, you can easily get in a car and drive it. (I honestly don't know from personal behind-the-wheel-experience, but I certainly do from passenger experience. The closest I ever got to saying prayers was alongside a driver who I later discovered had been under-reporting her drinks intake by an order of magnitude. Avoncliff, it was, near Bath, in 1988. Samantha, you know who you are.)

And drunken drivers kill. I don't need to hammer that point home.

But you try getting on a bike when you've had a drink too many. No, actually, don't. Because I have. It's not possible. Getting on a bike and pedalling it off in a straightish line requires a complex series of motor skills that's simply not going to happen if you're pissed.

And if you are, the only person you harm is yourself. Barked shins, bumped knees, grazed elbows. Possibly the odd scuffed lamppost. It is, fortunately for that idiot minicab man, moron taxi, and lunatic bus driver, a completely unlethal activity.

So hear this, Poland's Constutional Court: you are clearly bonkers and don't know what on earth you're ruling on. How on earth could you have come to such a ridiculous decision? What sort of over-indulgent activity might have led to such fuzzy thinking?

Ah, I think we can guess.