It may be fun - but is cycling part of the Good Life?

At the end of most weekdays during my first year of higher education, I would cycle to the central quadrangle of St Andrews University’s ancient buildings, head into a down-at-heel lecture theatre and ponder some of the biggest questions facing humankind. The most eagerly-anticipated Moral Philosophy lectures were by Gordon Graham, the department’s most charismatic lecturer. We teenage students would enter the room to find Dr Graham grasping the podium and peering keenly up at the rows of wooden seats. He brought to mind nothing so much as a hawk eager for some intellectually lazy morsel of first-year thinking to devour.

Praise from Dr Graham for one’s contribution from the floor would leave one feeling a little elevated for days – one enconium boosts my fragile ego 24 years later. Dr Graham’s scorn would leave a discernible chill.

The question is which side Dr Graham, who gave a particularly memorable lecture series on how to live “the Good Life”, would have come down on whether to get around a city by bicycle. The Good Life, Dr Graham eventually concluded, was “the rational life”, where one sought to do good to others, make the most of one’s abilities but also to be effective and rational. One should  reject mere gestures in favour of doing things that genuinely improved the human condition.

A cyclist in London rain: cycling feels part of the Good Life
some days more than others

I’ve dwelt in past posts on the irrationality of other road users’ behaviour towards me, as well as cycling’s capacity to spring sudden, joyful surprises. But are my own actions any more part of a rational life than those of the road-users I criticise? To put it less gracefully, would Dr Graham side with the tooth-suckers – the people who see my high-visibility vest and helmet, suck in their breath through clenched teeth and say, “I think you have to be mad to cycle in London”?

I should say at the outset that I’m not managing to live the rational life. A wholly rational person would drink less than I do, knowing that he was outweighing any health benefits by the damage incurred. A wholly rational person would eat less, weigh probably 20kg less, get more sleep and get less stressed about working in a job that, while it feels like one is writing the first draft of history, is ultimately fairly trivial. That’s even before tackling the subject of my wider belief systems, which I would stoutly defend but many people would criticise.

Nevertheless, it strikes me as more worthwhile to make a stab at living the rational life than merely to do what whim and hunch suggest. It’s consquently worth examining whether an activity that takes up at least an hour most days – more on many – and occupies an irrationally large amount of my waking thinking fits with such an aspiration.

It’s with the tooth-suckers that I most often discuss cycling’s rationality. The conversation generally starts with their saying, “I think you’re very brave” or “I love cycling but I wouldn’t like to try it in London” or just, “Isn’t it very dangerous?” The most depressing instance was the first time I met Geoff Hoon, then UK transport secretary, in his office. “So can you cycle around London?” he asked. I recognised how well pro-cycling initiatives would do under his leadership.

A big truck: the tooth-suckers think
one of these will get me some time

The tooth-suckers are ultimately claiming that any benefits I might gain from cycling are outweighed by a substantial risk that, sooner or later, I’ll find myself beneath the wheels of an articulated lorry. The hopeless dream that my steel-framed bike and vulnerable body could co-exist with trucks taking baked goods to Sainsbury’s will have literally been crushed.

My standard answer is to quote research conducted some years ago by the Cyclists’ Touring Club which showed the average British cyclist who cycled into middle age enjoyed life expectancy enhanced by two years, while risking on average losing only two months through cycling accidents. It’s a 12 to one benefit to cost ratio, I tell people. I even occasionally mention the subtle message of the obituaries page in the Cyclist Touring Clubs’ Cyclist magazine. Stories abound of wiry old devotees of the Sunday club run succumbing eventually only in their 80s or 90s.

Although I might have to hide a receipt for the latest £100 spent on my transmission while doing so, I could also point the tooth-suckers towards the financial advantages of cycling. Even with the amount of damage I seem to do to bike parts, I’m sure I’m spending less than if I commuted by public transport. I impose virtually no costs on others through wear and tear on the public roads.

There are also, of course, the environmental benefits, which many non-cyclists assume are a major factor in many people’s cycling. It is indubitably one of the few forms of transport – amid a motley selection including skateboarding and cross-country skiing – to involve carbon emissions only in the making of the equipment. It’s just unfortunate that one sounds so insufferably pompous talking about it.

The only time I’ve been tempted to raise my superior carbon status was when a woman honked loudly at me after I blew my congested nose’s contents onto a road at traffic lights. It was, I’m sure, not a pretty sight. But there was an irony in being reprimanded over my biodegradable mucus as she merrily pumped out long-lasting greenhouse gases.


While some motorists seem to regard me as a vast, insuperable obstacle in their way, it also seems rational to me to use a vehicle that takes up relatively little of the precious urban space devoted to roads. I'm sometimes tempted to ask motorists frustrated with being stuck behind me whether they'd prefer I was sitting in front of them in a car.

There is, meanwhile, scope for me to manage the safety risks. Although Transport for London research attributes blame for roughly two-thirds of accidents involving cyclists to the motor vehicles involved, there’s still substantial scope for me to cut down my chances of ending up in the road. Failing to look properly, failing to judge another person’s path or speed and being careless or in a hurry were the top three reasons for accidents attributed to cyclists. A careful cyclist can work at avoiding all of those.

Pedestrians: shouldn't they be
wearing helmets?

Yet there remains the objection I heard from one senior figure in my office. He had, he’d told me, been asked, on appointment to his present job, to stop cycling to work. He’d become too important to lose. To my point about cycling’s health benefits, he retorted that he went regularly to the gym. It is clearly true that the CTC’s averages for life expectancies mask very different distributions of the benefits and risks of cycling. Nearly every cyclist gets the extra two years – while the average lifespan lost through accidents represents an unfortunate few, each of whom may lose decades each.

Nevertheless, a check through Great Britain’s accident statistics for 2010 backs up a point I’d already deduced looking around my office. The intersection between colleagues who motorbiked and those to be seen outside with the smokers was striking. These are the real risk-takers - there were, I discovered, 36 cyclist deaths per billion vehicle miles in 2010, against a hair-raising 138 for motorcyclists. Even for pedestrians, the fatality rate per billion miles walked was 37. The only really safe group, I realised, was car occupants, wrapped in their steel shell and suffering only three fatalities for every billion vehicle miles. Each of the 111 cyclist deaths represents a real, avoidable tragedy. There should be far fewer. But I, for one, am prepared to accept the risks of an activity that, despite the appearances, is safer than walking.

Of course, it’s reasonable to ask whether any evidence I could have uncovered would have driven me off my bike. I would certainly be profoundly reluctant to give up the satisfaction of making my way around under my own power, feeling the wind on my face and hands and catching a sense of the city living around me.

But the powerful evidence in favour of cycling does, for me, improve the experience. It feels like the right choice, a rational choice. Then, occasionally, when the wind is in the right direction, the drivers polite and the roads clear, I even sense that I am, indeed, living the Good Life.


Are you making a rational decision to cycle? Are you making an irrational decision not to cycle? Are you making an irrational decision to cycle? You can work out roughly how these questions are working, so please just use the comments box to let us all know your answer.