BBC joins the cycling debate

BBC London's magazine show Inside Out last night featured an item on Lycra Louts. You can see it again on BBC's iPlayer for the next seven days.

As you'd expect, it's all very fuzzy and never quite knows what it's complaining about. Like the local-paper letter writer with their green biro, it just splutters vague cliches: things have gone too far, the pendulum's swung the other way, something must be done.

Jumping red lights? They produce no evidence that this causes accidents. In fact, a recent study did not particularly show that such behaviour causes accidents.

There are many places where jumping red lights - oh, alright then, getting off your bike and remounting just the other side of the red lights which is perfectly legal and achieves the same effect - is the only safe thing to do. London Road, near the Elephant, is an example.

In the programme they show a Kensington cyclist pulled up by the police for jumping a red. He politely explains that there was nobody on the crossing and no traffic. Now, we know that vehicles in ASLs never get nicked. It's because the police think the penalty is too harsh - sixty quid and three points - for a trivial offence. But here are cyclists getting done, because it's only thirty quid and that's OK.

Why, when we know that vehicles kill people and bicycles don't? Well, as the programme explains, it's because residents help police set priorities. The problem being that the meetings where these are decided take place at times like 10am on Thursday mornings, when only a certain chippy type of retired resident is likely to be able attend. At least, as recent experience in the City shows, such priorities can be reversed by simply turning up. (Luckily, such times are convenient for unemployable cycle bloggers.)

So was the programme's complaint about pavement cycling? Partly. They interview the mother of a child who was hit by a pavement cyclist. I'd be pretty pissed off, like her, if that had happened to me. Pavement cycling is at best terrible PR, and at worst very rude and mildly dangerous and people shouldn't do it. Or at least not when there's anybody about, particularly a film crew. But then I nearly get killed once a week on average by buses and taxis flouting the law, and bugger all gets done about that, except for form email responses.

Of course, the programme can't come up with any figures to show how bad the Pavement Menace is. There aren't any, because it's a problem mostly created in the pages of silly newspapers and the minds of silly people. The only figure it comes up with is Westminster Council's estimate that '1 in 5' cyclists 'flout the law', whatever that's supposed to mean. Well, 1 in 5 drivers are said to be uninsured in London, and I know which pose the greater danger. They talk about 'zero tolerance'. Why not for all road users, then?

And, inevitably, they visit Critical Mass, an event many Real Cyclists are ambivalent about, and show images of people honking trumpets and blocking the traffic, rather forgetting that traffic itself blocks traffic on Friday evenings in London pretty effectively.

And they didn't manage to get anyone to put the cyclists' case effectively. They got someone in fancy dress at CM (of course) and Tom Bogdanowicz from the LCC, who always has the worried look of a politician who's left his laptop on the train. They should have tracked down the Waltham Forest blogger and interviewed them alongside anti-cyclist Councillor Angela Harvey, who also features in the video, evidently on her way to the theatre. That'd be worth watching.

Oh well. Watch it and smile wryly.

Green light for red-light jumping on lethal London Road

Here's another example where a cyclist is much safer jumping the red lights. It's London Road, which runs northwest from the howdah riders of the Elephant and Castle to the trapeze artists and clowns of St George's Circus.

The pic right shows the view looking south towards the Elephant. The cyclist has just jumped a red light. And he's quite right to do so.


Here's why. Going north (right), from the lights, the left-hand lane is buses and cycles only. The rest of the road carries two lanes of oncoming regular traffic.

So what happens if you obediently wait for the green before setting off? You probably have a bus on your tail. And, unfortunately, not all the drivers are patient enough to wait for safety before overtaking you.


Many buses, perhaps finding the oncoming traffic is oncoming faster than they expected, cut in lethally close as they overtake you at high speed (right). Riding assertively, in the middle of the lane, is no use; it only makes drivers more impatient and more liable to overtake dangerously. Roughly speaking, I'd say that if you obey the lights, you get cut up between one in ten times, and five in ten times, depending on how fast a cyclist you are.

We had a very unpleasant such incident on Monday night. A near-death experience. A brush with mortality and a bus's boundary layer. I glimpsed my doppelgänger, riding a ghostly bike identical to mine, and he looked just like me, only older. It wasn't nice at all. And what did the driver have to say for himself? 'I dunno what you're talking about', before slamming the window shut. Anyway, the matter is currently in the hands of Transport for London's email profanity filter.

A few days ago I covered the new cycle lane at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge, whose only effect is to stop cyclists while giving no safety benefit. No wonder cyclists ignore the red there. (TfL haven't done anything about it yet, though they say they're aware and that the current signal phasing is only a temporary measure. Yeah, well, the Eiffel Tower was only a temporary measure in 1889.) But busting a red there is a matter of bypassing stupidity and inconvenience. Busting the red here, on London Road, is actually a safety benefit: you can put a safe distance between you and the assassin driving the wheeled office block behind you.

As it happens, I always stop at reds. Always. It's a sort of pride-cum-PR thing: I have a superiority complex as a cyclist, and want to show that I'm better than those idiot drivers who ignore ASLs and push their luck at the lights.

But my advice for anyone cycling this stretch is, for your own safety, to ignore the reds (if safe to do so, of course). I won't. But in this case you should do as I say, not do as I do.