Bikes can be hard to overtake - especially if they're faster than your car

It was one morning in December that I came across the driver who, because I wouldn’t let him overtake me, came close to driving over me instead. I had turned into a short, one-way street near my house when he swung in menacingly close behind. I felt no special worry, however. The road’s speed humps, which slow cars more than they do my bicycle, mean that, even when pulling my son in a trailer, most mornings I pull away from cars behind. I’m far more often stuck behind slower-moving cars in front.

But that was reckoning without this driver’s deep-seated need to overtake. Keeping his foot on the accelerator and the car in a low gear, he maintained his speed, unslackened, over the first speed bump, staying a metre or so behind me. I quickly found myself trapped in an urban cycling version of the film Speed. The road was so narrow, and so clogged with parked cars, that I couldn’t get out of the driver’s path. He was so close, however, that, if I’d slowed down to turn into the few vacant parking spaces, I could easily have gone under his wheels. Just as Keanu Reeves’ character in Speed has to keep a bus travelling at more than 50mph to stop a bomb going off, I had to stay riding fast enough for long enough, without skidding on the slippery speed bumps, that my pursuer wouldn’t hit me. He underlined his point by leaning out of his window to yell abuse.

A cyclist on Copenhagen's generously-proportioned
cycle lanes: the Irate Minivan Man of Brixton Hill
might not appreciate this charming Scandinavian city.

It’s one of motorists’ most common complaints about cyclists – along with the perennial (inaccurate) claim that we all ignore red lights – that bikes hold them up and get in their way. But my encounter highlights how some motorists feel something far stronger than a desire to avoid delay. My pursuer put himself close to me only by a deliberate, provocative, highly dangerous effort. It’s not hard to read into his behaviour – and that of quite a few other motorists and pedestrians I’ve encountered – a deeper set of reactions. It’s inherently unlikely, after all, that bicycles – vehicles that take up little road space and form a minority of road vehicles in most developed countries – are a genuinely significant cause of delay. I have certainly heard more cyclists complain about a journey’s being prolonged by the volume of cars than I have motorists complain about the same because of the volume of  bikes.

Cyclists, it seems, don't actually have priority on this
cycle path in Hyde Park,according to the sign.
But, well, why would they?

Some people’s existential irritation about sharing the road – or a cycle path - instead takes me back to my meeting with an embittered Protestant 14 years ago in a field outside Portadown, one of Northern Ireland's strongholds of Protestant loyalism to the United Kingdom. The man, who was protesting against the police and army’s blocking of a loyalist parade through a mainly Roman Catholic-Irish Nationalist area, described to me how, as a member of the Protestant majority, he felt downtrodden and oppressed by the Roman Catholic minority. The Catholics, who account for 40 per cent of the population, were getting more and more say in how things were run, he said. The province’s most influential jobs, I pointed out, remained in the hands of Protestants. Catholics remained, on average, poorer. Catholics, I also pointed out, had faced systematic discrimination until the 1970s, excluded from many jobs, from public housing and consequently from voting, which was restricted to householders. He hadn’t known anything about all that, he said. He hadn’t been aware of any problems.

His complaints were similar to ones I've heard from Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina about the country’s being controlled by Bosniaks, the country’s Muslims. A colleague once told me with distaste about how a white South African mining executive bitterly suggested to her that, given another life, he’d come back as a black woman. His theory – not, I suspect, based on a thorough investigation of women’s lives in the rough bits of Soweto – was that positive discrimination now made black women’s lives easier than those of white South African men.

All such complaints reflect, it seems to me, the powerful human instinct for those who belong to privileged groups to believe their status a reflection of their own group’s merit. If those privileges are reduced – or extended to another, excluded group – the reaction is often similar. The formerly-downtrodden – whether of a different ethnic group or simply using a different kind of vehicle – are seen as bumptious, difficult, undeserving usurpers.

Which brings me back to the Irate Minivan Driver of Brixton Hill.

 A bike lane on Southwark Bridge: many London motorists
have concluded, the Invisible Visible Man can exclusively reveal,
that the bike pictures in such facilities are a new form of pavement art.
It can hardly, they've decided, be as if cyclists should be given
all this road space.

I can only imagine that my pursuer, if he has been driving around central London for any significant proportion of the last ten years, has felt “his” share of the road shrinking around him. Cyclist numbers have doubled or more on many central London streets, meaning that he will increasingly often have to moderate his behaviour to cope with bicycles. There have been similar increases in other big rich world cities. The issues surrounding cycling are less all-encompassing than the questions that face Northern Irish Catholics or South African blacks. But, in many metropolises, drivers like the Irate Minivan Man feel, it seems to me, a nostalgia similar to that of the man I met in Portadown for the says before a resented, encroaching group started to get ideas above their station.

Even for those drivers I genuinely force to slow down, however, it is rare for a delay to stretch beyond milliseconds into seconds. I have, as I have detailed in a previous blog, been abused by an angry motorist because I had delayed her arrival at the end of a traffic jam. The sheer numbers of motor vehicles – which really do cause congestion – have risen sharply in recent years in many big cities at the same time as cycling numbers. The vehicles, both parked and on the move, have also grown steadily larger, exacerbating their congestion-causing effect. In a rational world, my minivan-driving hunter would have been just as angry with the parked cars, the real reason it was unsafe to let him pass. Any doubts I might have had about motorists' attitude on this matter were dispelled when I read a comment on a (since deleted) post on the excellent Cycling Lawyer blog. The commenter complained about how s/he particularly worried about passing the biggest, fittest cyclists because they tended to outpace his or her car up hills.

Clapham Common: pedestrians can get
just as angry as minivan drivers

Yet an incident a couple of years ago on Clapham Common, a couple of kilometres from where I encountered the Irate Minivan Driver, suggests the real root of some of the resentment. I was cycling across the common, on a designated cycle path, when I encountered a man, with his back to me, pushing a baby buggy. I slowed down and, because he was turned away, rang my bell several times, to no effect. “Don’t worry – I heard you,” he eventually shouted over his shoulder, refusing even to look round. There was a whole common for me to cycle across, he suggested. He wouldn’t get out of my way.

London's Paddington Station: The Invisible Visible Man's bike is in
here somewhere (though, predictably,  not visible). Network Rail,
the station's owners, seem as reluctant as others in London
to give bikes the space they need.

The parallel pedestrian path, nevertheless, was only a couple of metres away. There was only one designated cycle route the way I needed to go. The man seemed as infuriated at the devotion of space to a cycle path as Irate Minivan Man was at my taking up space on the road. It is one of several similar incidents I’ve encountered on paths across the Common.

On a road just by the common, meanwhile, I pulled in one Saturday to the space devoted to bikes at a set of traffic lights. I was pulling the Invisible Visible Boy in a trailer and pulled towards the centre of the road to let the Invisible Visible Woman into the area with the Invisible Visible Girl and her trailer bike. Incensed by my using the space for its designated purpose, a well-spoken, middle-class motorist pulled forward beside me, rolled down his window and said, with an air of deliberate threat: “If you stay at the side of the road, you won't get hit.” When the lights turned green, he accelerated away so fast his tyres squealed. Interestingly, pedestrians generally avoid obstructing the several roads that cut across and spoil the Common the way some feel compelled to do on the cycle paths.

Yet such bizarre, ingrained attitudes aren’t immutable. It was once held axiomatic that very little could be done to reduce drinking and driving – a problem that has been sharply reduced in many countries through consistent, unequivocal public information campaigns. Only a few years ago, prejudice against gays and lesbians went unchallenged. Before that, broad generalisations about blacks or Asians were accepted in polite society.

Such progress looks some way off for cyclists, however. Until it arrives, I’ll have to hope encounters with the likes of Irate Minivan Man end as relatively harmlessly as that one eventually did. After around 150 frantically-pedalled metres, a long break in the cars let me pull over. He accelerated past me and screeched off round a junction. He was, I imagine, frustrated. It requires self-discipline for any group to tolerate ceding territory to another. But nothing I did could have cost him more than a few moments. Had I slipped on one of the speed bumps or otherwise lost my nerve, the consequences of his driving for me could have been many, many times further-reaching.