A rainy weather puncture, a wave of negativity - and how the haters aren't sweating cycling's details

As conditions for a cycle commute go, the steady rain this past Friday - which supplanted the recent foggy weather - was unattractive even before I started hearing a strange clicking sound from my bike’s front wheel. An inspection revealed the sound was coming from a drawing pin - or tack - stuck in the tyre. I was, briefly, hopeful that the robust puncture proofing of my Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres might have protected my inner tube. When I pulled the tack free, however, I heard a steady hissing that told me I was going to be undertaking a roadside repair.

A chance tack in a cycle lane or a symbol
of the anti-cycling backlash? The mystery
remains unsolved

Then, after I’d discarded the tack, I started to ponder the antipathy towards cycling and cyclists that I’ve spent considerable time recently discussing in person and via social media. The UK is in the midst of one of its periodic anti-cycling backlashes and I suddenly wondered if the tack had ended up in the new cycle path by Kennington Park by happenstance or malice. I scoured the wet pavement for the tack, photographed it then posted a query on twitter to ask if anyone else had suffered similar problems in the same area.

The act of posting the picture turned my mind back to thoughts about the roots of the recent rage in some newspapers and by some politicians against the growth of cycling. After I recently wrote about the gulf in understanding between cyclists and cycling sceptics, I was bombarded with complaints that I was ignoring some vast conspiracy by the media and politicians to do down cycling. Commenters accused me of varying levels of complacency or complicity in this plot.

I've been assured that I was naive to believe there was no generalised campaign against cycling because it was naive to think automakers had changed tack since their 1920s campaign in the US to have jaywalking outlawed. I've been told that Volvo engineers' designing of a cycle helmet shows there's a plot - use of cycling helmets, after all, correlates with lower cycling levels. I have been repeatedly told that the recent spate of newspaper anti-cycling stories can't be coincidence and even seen it posited that a particular national newspaper reporter "must be in somebody's pay".

The truth is less exciting but no less worrying, I’m convinced. Having spent most of the last 13 years writing at least partly about transport, I simply don’t think most opponents of cycling - either in the UK or the US, where I lived for four years - care enough about the mode to mount such a conspiracy. It seems to me that, instead, many of the media attacks draw on unspoken paradigms about the nature of government. The sprouting of cycle lanes is taken to be an example of the work of politically correct (or possibly “bungling”) bureaucrats, who wrongly think they know better than the average, car-driving newspaper reader what the transport system needs. Cyclists are regarded as some sort of strange out-group like vegans or hardline environmentalists seeking to destroy the lifestyles that ordinary, common-sense people regard as entirely unproblematic.

The best way to combat this narrative, it seems to me, is to seek to change the terms of the debate. I believe there’s a sound, common-sense case for promoting cycling that, in the UK at least, is getting drowned out by complaints about the alleged anti-cycling conspiracy and bitter rows on twitter. It’s all the more urgent to get progress re-started because present conditions continue to prove deadly. Lucia Ciccioli, a 32-year-old Italian woman, was killed on October 24 cycling to work in Lavender Hill, not far from my house in Brixton. A week later, another Italian, Filippo Corsini, 21, was crushed by a lorry in Knightsbridge. I hope that a new venture, Humanstreets, modelled on the admirable, New York-based Streetsblog, will play an important role in making that case.

London's North-South Cycle Superhighway,
at Southwark St: yes, the Daily Mail's
written angry stories about this facility's
existence; no, I don't think they're angry
for the reasons many others suppose

But, as I stood by the side of Kennington Park Road wrestling with my hard-to-remove tyres, I wasn’t feeling optimistic.

I started to think about the nature of anti-cycling anger after seeing a post on Twitter querying why the Daily Mail - which recently ran several pieces claiming that new cycling lanes were “paralysing Britain” - had run a piece touting cycling’s health benefits. The tweet’s tone was to query the Mail’s consistency. But, to anyone who’s worked in a newspaper, the idea that different sections of a paper would need to agree on such a matter is, frankly, ludicrous. British newspaper reporters are, in my experience, mostly uninterested in the content of the policy issues that they cover and far more interested in framing it into what they regard as a compelling narrative. The Daily Mail has a powerful bias in favour of thinking civil servants and council officials are engaged in some plot to impose bad ideas on ordinary Britons. The recent attacks follow that narrative, it seems to me, rather than being based on any strong idea about cycling.

The Daily Mail’s sinister genius is its ability to seize on almost any policy development as evidence that the world does indeed work the odd way its news editors believe it does. Like many people with an interest in road safety, I’m sure, I felt my heart lift this week when I saw that the Mail had run a front page story on distracted driving - only to feel it sink again when I saw that it was defining the problem as being one of foreign drivers. The story was a reminder of how different worldviews compete within many media organisations to shape how issues are reported. The story about cycling’s health benefits reflected the paper’s conviction that its readers want to find out ways to better their health. For that section, that narrative trumped the notion that cycling promotion was the work of nanny-ish bureaucrats.

The Mail’s tendency to report the world according to a set of preconceived notions is unusually pronounced but it has its less sinister counterparts in other places. The Guardian, for example, tends to report public-sector activity favourably and to report on business’ behaviour unfavourably. Some financially-orientated publications are apt to identify strongly with private businesses’ perceived interests. Most politicians I’ve met have a similar tendency to believe in a few core principles and then, in George Orwell’s telling phrase, to buy the rest of their opinions in “matching pairs”.

The East-West Cycle Superhighway by
the Palace of Westminster: inhabited by
owners of opinions bought in matching pairs

Some of the reporting, meanwhile, reflects the one circumstance when cycling policy does get people's attention - when it threatens something important to them, such as the free parking space they regard as a right. This explains, for example, the regular rows in New York when the Citibike bike-share scheme arrives in a new neighbourhood. People have seen that Citibike is coming but take little interest until suddenly a parking space disappears. The same phenomenon explains the perennial popularity of bad and dangerous on-road cycling facilities. Many politicians are eager to enjoy the chic, green-tinged halo of introducing a bike-share scheme or theoretically encouraging cycling. Yet few are prepared to weather the political storm of introducing facilities, like London’s new segregated cycle superhighways, that truly reallocate space away from motor vehicles and give it to cyclists. Unsatisfactory compromises - bike routes down hard-to-access old railway lines, for example - proliferate.

During my 25 years in the newspaper industry, I have been far more dismayed by other reporters’ cynicism, willingness to go along with news editors’ ill-informed instincts and incuriosity about policy detail than I have by any willingness to cave to outside lobbying. Much the same goes for politicians. When he first became mayor, for example, Boris Johnson - now practically sainted among active travel lobbyists as father of the segregated superhighways - took a series of harmful steps to further what he saw as a pro-business, anti-bureaucrat agenda. He removed space-efficient articulated buses, replacing them with a far worse alternative, scrapped the successful western extension of the congestion charging zone and undertook other measures aimed at “smoothing traffic flow”. Among the traffic-smoothing measures were the admission of motorbikes to bus lanes and a tinkering with traffic-light timing that reduced the time for pedestrians to cross at many busy junctions. All of these measures have contributed to London’s continuing problem with congested, unsafe roads.

The new bus for London: one of Boris
Johnson's early contributions to making
London's roads less efficient

I see this intellectual laziness and policy cowardice as far bigger barriers to the advance of cycling than alleged campaigns - always described as “well-funded” - by sceptical cycling opponents. I recognise that the main incident that fuelled these fears - the circulation by Canary Wharf Group of a screed complaining about plans for cycle superhighways - occurred while I was in New York and away from London policy issues. I also know that London business lobby groups continue to agitate about congestion in London and to blame it disproportionately on the cycle superhighways, which are only one of a series of factors contributing to the current worsening of motor vehicle congestion in central London despite falls in traffic levels. The London Taxi Drivers’ Association continues to fight sensible cycling schemes such as the Tavistock Place cycle tracks in Bloomsbury.

Yet it seems clear to me that the basic instincts of the media organisations concerned and reporters’ tendency to copy stories that they feel have touched a nerve with readers are more than sufficient to explain the current rash of stories. The cowardice of the worst kind of local politician in the face of what he or she perceives to be the public mood is more than adequate to explain the backtracking in many parts of the UK on cycling plans and the actual ripping out of an already-built facility in the Scottish town of Ayr.

Congestion on Southwark Bridge: campaigners need to
get better at combatting fears about such conditions
if progress is to resume

The good news is that fights against prejudice and cowardice are winnable. It was once held as axiomatic on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, that the struggle against drink-driving was driven by politically-correct nannyism. The practice’s dangers are now universally accepted. There was shock last week when part of the Daily Mail’s criticism of a judge involved in the Article 50 Brexit case was that he was “openly gay”. Until the 1990s, it might have been regarded as a legitimate scoop to expose his sexual orientation.

The bad news is that such battles tend to be protracted, painful and to require considerable guile. Cycling advocates need, it seems to me, to do a far better job of addressing people’s fears about what allocation of space - and time at traffic signals - to cycling means. Will it hold up bus passengers? Can a lower-capacity road really handle all the deliveries businesses along the route expect? I’ve said before that campaigners’ arguments should be far less nit-picking and far more addressed towards a mainstream audience.

After the repair: my bike as I prepared to ride off, feeling
down at heart

It’s not only because of Friday’s experience that I feel pessimistic about prospects, however. Battle lines on both the pro and anti-cycling side seem very clearly drawn. Few people are airing novel arguments.

The worst and most bitter people, meanwhile, are resorting to more direct measures. While I don’t know how the tack I picked up came to be on the cycle path, another twitter user told me he recalled hearing of a tack’s being left around the same place recently. Multiple cyclists riding on the Bearsway cycle path north of Glasgow on Sunday picked up tacks, suggesting a co-ordinated effort at sabotage. That follows a recent, similar incident in Regent’s Park, in London.

Whether my incident was part of that pattern or not, I rode off after 20 minutes’ repair work damp and cold, with skinned knuckles, feeling decidedly downbeat. I will feel more optimistic only when the UK's debate about cycling policy breaks free of its current, unproductive impasse.

A broken-down church - and a broken, asymmetric flow of information

I was only a little way into my first ride to work after moving into my apartment in Brooklyn when I started to get into a terrible tangle. Trying to get down Kane Street, in Cobble Hill, I found the road marked closed. After heading past the road cones, I found it was a proper road closure, not the kind where one just wheels the bike on the sidewalk past the obstruction. The closure was absurd, I muttered to myself, as the one-way system pushed my route further and further from the one I’d planned. It was, I reasoned, probably some piece of stupidity on the part of the police, worried about being sued over an unlikely accident near some relatively innocuous building work.

Christ Church, Cobble Hill: source of frustration on
the Invisible Visible Man's commute

I calmed down considerably, however, after finding out via Google why the street was closed. On July 26, while I had been back in Europe, lightning had struck Christ Church, the Episcopal church at the junction of Clinton Street and Kane Street. The spectacular tower – and scaffolding around it – had come crashing down as Richard Schwartz, a pedestrian, was walking underneath. The falling scaffolding had killed him. The building was a serious danger – and hadn’t yet been made safe.

The incident helped to crystallise an idea that had been slopping in fluid form around my mind for a while. I’d never have been irritated about the Kane St closure, I realised, if I’d had better information in the first place. It was, it occurred to me, one of many instances where confusion arises because two different parties – the New York City Department of Transportation and myself, in the Kane Street case – have different understandings of what’s going on on a road. The asymmetric information sharing had at least left me only inwardly irritated, however. The more I thought about it, the more I realised there were times when such information asymmetry probably killed people.

I encountered one potentially serious example the other morning while riding to work. I waited at traffic lights by the start of the Tillary Street segregated bike lane near the Brooklyn Bridge. When the lights changed, I moved off, only to find turning across my path a car heading in the other direction that should have been yielding to me. The driver’s behaviour was entirely wrong, based on his failure to understand what I knew - that the bike lane was as much part of the traffic flow at the intersection as the roads he was using. But, as he moved across my path, he leant out of his window. “Green light!” he yelled at me, self-righteously.

Traffic on W54th street. Those tainted windows don't,
in the Invisible Visible Man's experience, conceal
motorists pondering hard what information they might lack
about other road users' rights

Cycle lanes can give rise to information asymmetry as well. As I approached my office one morning last month, a truck driver opened his door in my path as I made my way up the side of some stalled traffic. He didn’t need to look for cyclists on that side of W54th street, he argued, because there was a bike lane painted down the other. Because of our asymmetric understanding of cyclists’ road rights, he had understood the cycle lane – which I knew to be a refuge for cyclists that didn’t stop me from using the rest of the road – as a kind of prison, to which cyclists should be confined.

Perhaps the most striking and persistent problem of information asymmetry that I’ve come across, however, was in London, where I lived until last August. Most traffic lights at busy intersections in London feature an “advanced stop line” for cyclists – an area where cyclists are meant to wait ahead of the other traffic for the lights to change. Many cyclists value advance stop lines as an idea, since they should, in theory, allow cyclists to get away after lights change, get clipped back into their pedals and get back into a suitable line on the road before the motor traffic catches up. Few motorists, however, seem to have much idea either about the principles of the advanced stop areas or when they should stay out of them. At least one motorist informed me, indignantly, when I complained about his occupying the area that when he’d arrived there had been no cyclists waiting, so he’d simply driven into the bike area.

Advance stop lines were involved in all three of the worst confrontations I had with motorists in London. In one case, a motorist deliberately drove very close to me and then very dangerously overtook me after I remonstrated with him about his driving into the ASL area as I was using it. A bus driver assaulted me (abandoning a bus full of passengers to do so) after I photographed his occupying the ASL area at a particularly dangerous junction. I had to call the police to stave off a threatened assault from another motorist to whom I’d complained about his driving into the ASL area.

Leaving aside the more eye-catching incidents, ASLs were a daily source of tension and frustration. I’d often squeeze past a line of stationary traffic to reach what was meant to be a haven for cyclists – only to fill it full of motorists grumpy at one’s presumption in seeking to get a jump on them at the lights. It’s reasonable, I think, to assume that even a fairly modest publicity campaign might have let at least a little of the fresh air of information into the foetid atmosphere of confrontation surrounding ASLs. In New York, it surely wouldn’t take much of a campaign to educate drivers about the role of bike lanes and the dangers of passing bikes too close to improve driving standards at least a little bit. The New York cycling map, after all, features excellent advice for cyclists on how motorists should give cyclists at least three feet's clearance when passing.

It isn’t, after all, a neutral thing to encourage new cyclists onto a city’s streets and then not tell motorists how to behave around them. Nature seems to abhor an information vacuum just as much as a literal one. In the absence of the pure oxygen of accurate, well-founded information, the information vacuum fills up with the carbon-monoxide-laden air of motorists’ assumptions about cyclists’ rights and responsibilities. It’s perhaps hardly surprising, given that no-one’s telling them otherwise, that so many motorists assume cyclists who ride well outside the door zone away from cars are acting maliciously, rather than entirely sensibly. In New York, it’s still less surprising given how many bike lanes – including most of those I use every day – are painted in precisely the part of the road – next to the parked cars’ doors – that cyclists know to be the most dangerous.

The air has grown still more poisoned because the agency meant to set the limits of acceptable behaviour in most modern societies – the police force – so often seems to have abandoned that role with regard to the road rules. Motorists, after all, like most other people see what they see others doing unmolested and assume it’s acceptable. One telling recent case I spotted involved a police effort to start fining motorists who drove in a bike lane on a narrow street at Twickenham, in South-West London (I’ll give New York cyclists a moment here to come to terms with the idea that, just across the Atlantic, there’s a police force that has, at least once, acted against motorists using a bike lane). A local newspaper quoted Nick Blyth, an officer involved in the enforcement effort, as saying: “Most of the motorists tend to comment when stopped that everyone else does it and they were just following them.”

 

Park right across one of New York City's busiest bike lanes?
Until someone says you shouldn't, you probably will.

It’s hardly surprising, given the New York Police Department’s reluctance to enforce a wide swathe of road rules, that few motorists seem even to understand the harm they cause when double-parking in bike lanes or refusing to yield to a cyclist in a bike lane. Nor, in London, is it terribly surprising that ASL infringements continue at the rate they do when even the Metropolitan Police department charged with processing complaints against motorists from cyclists (normally backed by helmet camera evidence) is currently pleading with leading London cycle bloggers to tell people to send in no more pictures of ASL infringements. They say, to all intents and purposes, they’ve no interest in prosecuting them.

The police’s attitude reflects, in an understated way, the strangeness of the political discourse around cycling. Politicians are eager, when announcing new policies between elections, to borrow cycling’s mantle of greenness and modernity and to encourage its growth. Closer to election time, meanwhile, many seem to revert to a different type – to claiming, like one minister I met, that cyclists were“their own worst enemies” or claiming like Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, that “typical” cyclists had skinny legs and ran red lights. No politician engaged in this delicate dance between pro and anti-cycling positions is likely to back a public information campaign explaining to frustrated motorists why, yes, that cyclist who yelled at you about your dangerous driving actually had an excellent point.

However, until such information is made more widely available and police across the industrialised world are backing up the politicians’ line with proper enforcement, few people will experience the relief I felt at letting go of my frustration over the Kane St closure. Relief is certainly not the emotion that comes naturally to me each morning as I ride along the now-reopened Clinton St towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I am all too often forced into the narrow bike lane, in danger from car doors, as motorists seek to push past me. But, as I reach the Kane St intersection and see Christ Church, still wrecked but now made safe, I still recall at least a little bit of that feeling.

Staten Island and why the Invisible Visible Man is the Opposite of a Canary

It was a brief taste of how most of suburban America and Europe lives and it wasn’t, frankly, terribly pleasant. This past Wednesday, for work reasons, I took my bike and, for only the second time in my life, travelled by ferry to Staten Island, an island off the New Jersey shore that historical accident has made part of New York City. Having mostly developed only in the 1960s after the opening of the Verrazano Narrows road bridge to Brooklyn, it was designed around the private car far more than other parts of the city. It’s the nearest thing in New York City to a chunk of true American suburbia – featureless apart from occasional strip malls and criss-crossed by wide, fast-moving, multi-lane expressways.

A shared cycle route marking in St George: much the likeliest
way to see a bike on the road in Staten Island

I began to have concerns about cycling conditions even before I was properly out of St George, the borough’s capital. A bus driver drove at me, apparently astonished that my being ahead of him in traffic meant I thought I should go first through a pinch point. Later on, I started to wonder if I had put myself in serious danger. Unable to use the seafront cycle path – still blocked with sand from Superstorm Sandy – I headed inland along long, straight six-lane avenues. The 30mph and 35mph speed limits on these roads seemed to be regarded as minimum permissible speeds. Encountering a cyclist, such drivers simply drove straight on, at speed, towards the bike, on the apparent assumption the cyclist would scuttle out of the way.

Duane Square, TriBeCa: not specifically cycle-friendly
- but not hostile either

But I probably shouldn’t have found the conditions surprising. While I have multiple complaints about cycling conditions in brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan – the places where I currently mostly ride – and in London – where I used to ride – these are actually atypically cycle-friendly environments. Many roads are narrow – inhibiting drivers’ tendency to speed – and the traffic’s sheer volume makes the speeds on Staten Island mostly impossible. The obvious attractions in such an environment of the bicycle – which can slip along such streets while cars remain gnarled in traffic jams – have contributed to recent years’ rapid growth in inner-city cycling numbers. Better provision is slowly arriving in the wake of increased cycling.

Conditions on Staten Island are far more typical of the places that most rich countries’ inhabitants live. Such places provide most inhabitants with a house on its own plot of land – but suffer from the sheer volume of traffic that sprawling, low-density cities generate.  I’ve encountered similar conditions in parts of commuter-belt Oxfordshire, Cheshire and Scotland’s central belt. Cyclists tend not to give much thought to such places for the simple reason that very few cyclists live in them.

The natural reaction might be to conclude that cycling is impossible in such places, to avoid visiting them as far as possible and to leave the bicycle behind when circumstance forces one to do so. The only alternative is a wholesale rethink of the car’s role in such societies.

It’s often said that cycling children are a kind of “canary-in-the-coalmine” of cycling policy. If you disperse pretty much every danger factor for cyclists in your city, you’ll find primary school children riding to school. Let even a few of them creep back and the kids will disappear.

After his Staten Island visit, the Invisible
Visible Man will hardly complain in future
about scenes such as this in Manhattan.

By that standard, I’m closer to being the explosion in the coalmine. I regularly cycle along fairly busy, high-traffic roads, including fast-moving dual carriageways in the UK. If the danger factors somewhere have built up to the point somewhere that they’re intimidating me, it’s a reasonable sign cycling conditions are seriously, dangerously hostile.

I mostly managed in Staten Island to stick to the principle that a cyclist should boldly take the lane and force motorists to manoeuvre safely around him. But even I at points hugged closer to the kerb than normal, darting out into the threatening traffic mainly to get round obstructions such as parked cars. It felt hard to keep taking the lane on seeing a line of fast-moving SUVs, three abreast, bearing down on one, giving no sign whatever of yielding to a cyclist in front of them. I wasn’t confident I wanted to waste my dying breaths explaining to some over-sized car’s driver precisely why my road craft should have prevented him from running me over.

So is there an alternative for cyclists to the appalling conditions that currently exist in Staten Island and many other suburban areas? One standard cycling lobby answer is to argue that entirely separate cyclist provision is needed and that to call for anything less is counter-productive. Cyclists and such heavy, fast-moving traffic can never co-exist.

Yet I left Staten Island doubting that calls for a network of dedicated cycle lanes on Staten Island would get very far under current conditions. I saw, as far as I can recall, one other cyclist during an afternoon and early evening on the island. It’s hard to see that a democratic society can risk spending heavily to create facilities for a group – Staten Island utility cyclists – that might not even emerge in the end. That’s all the more the case at the moment, when my cycle route took me past large tracts of shoreline land that remained flooded and empty in the wake of Sandy’s devastation of the island. Even as a dedicated cyclist, I think finite budgets at the moment are best spent on ensuring all Staten Island’s people again have waterproof, heated houses.

There are nevertheless compelling reasons beyond encouraging cycling to stop the cancer of car-dependence from draining the life out of Staten Island. The wide, uncalmed roads, it was clear, were intimidating away people other than cyclists. I saw just as few people walking the sidewalks of the busiest roads as I saw people cycling. The excellent “weekly carnage”feature on Streetsblog, the transport website, features regular stories of Staten Island’s elderly and other vulnerable people crushed by motor vehicles refusing to yield at corners. Many of those fast-moving vehicles end up ploughing into each other, at a high human cost. There’s every reason even for someone who’s not a cyclist to support the installations of road designs that slow drivers down and speed cameras.

Ideally, the United States would increase fuel taxes to cover more of the costs cars impose on places such as Staten Island. A rational system of per-mile charging could calm down the worst of the congestion. Research suggests that cars might even get where they’re going faster under such a regime than they do at present.

Manhattan approaching, from the Staten Island ferry:
a welcome sight, from a cyclist's point of view

A new approach to cars would, of course, produce a better environment for on-road cycling too. It’s far from impossible that in Staten Island calmer, less threatening roads might start to entice out of their hiding places some of the bikes that must be lying unused in the borough’s homes. The island might start participating more fully in the cycling boom that’s taking place, to varying degrees, in New York’s other four boroughs. That, in turn, might make it easy to justify new cycle-only lanes for some future reporter who finds himself heading to a distant corner of Staten Island on an assignment.

As it was, finding dark had descended and contemplating the prospect of a 10½ mile ride on threatening roads back to the ferry, I took, unusually, the line of least resistance. Fending off threatening cars, I rode half a mile to the nearest Staten Island Railway Station and, my bike leaning against my seat, took in the island’s night-time lights as most of its inhabitants do – from within the comfort of a metal shell.

Farewell to London - where cycling's popular, but just on paper

It was the closest I’ve come in the last little while to ending up under the wheels of a car. As I cycled home from work in London on July 20, just by the Oval cricket ground, a car passed me far, far too close. I pulled towards the kerb and jammed on my brakes. But, amid precisely the kind of light drizzle that makes roads treacherous, the slippery surface of one of the London Mayor’s ironically-named Cycle Superhighways nearly did for me. I started to skid alarmingly, swinging side to side in close proximity to the speeding car. It’s the kind of incident I’m sometimes inclined to think may reflect my cowardice rather than the actual danger. But, as I slithered to a stop and my right pedal skinned the back of my calf, a pedestrian came up to me, looking worried. “Did he hit you?” he asked.

Brooklyn Bridge: a new focus for
the Invisible Visible Man's frustrations

Nasty though it was, my sliding stop at the Oval would not have been especially notable – except that it took place on my last commute for the foreseeable future in London. My route-to-work gripes are now about the stupidity of tourists on the Brooklyn Bridge, the traffic snarl of downtown Brooklyn and when precisely the large model rat that protesters have placed in one lane of W54th Street in Manhattan might disappear for good. The London mayor’s superhighways and the Metropolitan Police’s indifference towards anti-cyclist crime are fast becoming a distant memory.

W54th street: rat trouble

But the incident seemed as neat a bookend as any to 11 years of cycling in London – nine years during my most recent stint and two years prior before our four-and-a-half years in Hungary. As I thought about it afterwards, my mind wandered back to a dark January night in 1997 when I swung my leg over my then Raleigh Mercury bicycle and set off for my first-ever bike ride in London. I was at a car rental depot in Catford and had just returned the rented van that had brought my and the Invisible Visible Woman’s belongings down from Edinburgh. I had to find my way across the alternately grim and genteel suburbs of south-east London to my new home.

To hear London’s politicians bragging about their recent achievements in encouraging cycling, one would imagine that my journey 15-odd years ago should have been nearly impossible. In fact, there were already some designated cycle routes to guide me across tracts of non-descript suburbia such as Forest Hill. The journey was about as pleasant as a ride on a cold January evening in a strange area could be.

The Invisible Visible Man's Raleigh Mercury:
gaudy-coloured veteran of his first ride in London.

The memory of cycling all that time ago nevertheless put a question in my mind. Are London and other cities enjoying fast-rising cycling numbers rising because cities are making progress, learning from their past mistakes, in their treatment of cyclists? Or are cycling numbers increasing despite city authorities’ failure to understand what cyclists need?

It would be silly, naturally, to claim London cycling had shown no improvement over my time. The biggest positive change has been the wholesale redesign of many urban London roads. The space at many junctions has been narrowed, to prevent cars swinging round them at high speed. Many streets have been made to look narrower, a step that has brought motorists’ speed down. Parking spaces in many places are now more clearly marked as an area off to the side of the main carriageway. I used, when I first cycled in London, inwardly to ask drivers who’d prevented my swinging round a parked car, “How did you think I’d get round it? Fly?” It’s a line that popped into my head far less often later in my time in London than in the late 1990s. That it’s coming back to me again regularly in New York illustrates how big a lesson the Big Apple’s traffic planners have to learn from London in this area.

Cycle Superhighway 7 at Southwark Bridge.
This part still has a slippery surface -
but is at least protected from poor drivers

There has been some modest improvement in the quality of cyclist-specific infrastructure in London too. The number of bike parking places has increased sharply – albeit not as fast in many areas as the demand to park bicycles. The number of markings telling motorists to leave space for cyclists at junctions has increased. The cycle superhighways have appeared along a number of main roads, although my experience in July illustrates the problems with putting routes with slippery surfaces along busy main roads where nothing is done to prevent cars driving poorly.

But the curious point that my July 20 experience illustrates is not how much has changed since 1997 but how much remains the same, despite 15 years when every senior politician associated with London has expressed devotion to improving the cyclist’s lot.

I’d seen the motorist that buzzed me behind me at traffic lights and, seeing that he was driving a black, souped-up saloon car, guessed that he was likely to overtake me dangerously. Sure enough, instead of waiting for a safe place and space, he barged through as if, essentially, I weren’t there. Looking at it from the motorist’s point of view, perhaps that isn’t surprising. The British Highway Code certainly tells motorists they should give cyclists as much passing space as another car. But who’s reminding motorists of that point? Aside from a half-hearted Transport for London campaign a few years ago urging motorists and cyclists to “share the road,” there’s been almost no effort to educate motorists over ten years when cyclist numbers have doubled.

Copenhagen: other cities want the sense of cool -
but not the messy reality of cyclists

Yet almost none of the politicians or officials I’ve heard talking about encouraging cycling has seemed to have cyclists and cycling as their focus. Cycling was meant to cut road congestion, or reduce pollution or increase people’s physical activity rates. With some politicians, it’s tempting to conclude that they want mass cycling almost as a sign of their city’s coolness – look, our people cycle just like people in Amsterdam! Look, you could barely tell us apart from Copenhagen! A few years ago, there was a similar craze in Europe for planning light rail systems. Bikes seem, in more straitened times, to have taken over.

The result is that the people who make decisions in big cities seem ill-prepared for cycling’s messy reality. Since 1997, tens of thousands more Londoners have started pedalling into central London every morning. Most of them are in a hurry; many are no more considerate of their fellow road users than the motorists alongside them and all of them take up at least some space on the roads. The picture of cycling in many politicians’ heads seems to be drawn from the architectural drawings they show off when boasting about a planned riverside park or other “green” amenity. The cyclists in those never look like they’re in a hurry or like they’re shouting at some idiot that’s stepped into the cycle lane without looking. Many policymakers – and plenty of motorists – seem affronted when cyclists diverge from this unrealistic ideal. Nobody wants to spell out to motorists that, in a given road space, more cyclists means less space for cars. We’re  meant to take as little effort to pass as the paper-thin, pencil-drawn cyclists in the politicians’ drawings. People are happy if their neighbours free up a parking space by taking up cycling – and furious if they ever get in their way on the road.

It’s certainly not a London-only problem. Ten days after my permanent move to New York, I was bowling fast down a marked cycle lane in Brooklyn, reflecting that the lane was far too close to the parked cars. A car door suddenly opened, I jammed on my brakes and, just as I had in London, lost traction and skidded – once again fairly safely – to a halt. New York cycle lanes’ placing reflects the same, apparently widespread delusions as policy in London – that cyclists should take up no space, have no momentum and always be ready to give way to pretty much any other road user.

It’s not inevitable, however, that every politician will always prefer to let motorists set the agenda. The change that has done most since 1997 in London to boost cycling numbers was introduction in 2003 of a charge for driving into central London during weekday peak hours. The decision, by making clear the costs of road use, instantly removed large numbers of vehicles from central London's roads. Cyclists took up some of the freed space. Advisers to Ken Livingstone, London’s then mayor, advised strongly against introduction of the congestion charge, on the grounds that no battle with London’s motorists could ever be won. In recent mayoral elections, while candidates have proposed modifications, no serious candidate has suggested ending the charge altogether.

It’s hard to foresee the circumstances that would prompt a future London leader – or a mayor of New York or any other similar world city – to take firm action finally to prioritise bicycles properly over cars. Until it happens, there may be further, incremental rises in cyclist numbers of the kind London has experienced since 2003. But proper progress will require real boldness.

Cops, pedallers and why they're picking on me

It was as I started pedalling across Southwark Bridge from Lower Thames Street in the City of London that I spotted the police car chasing after me, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I was about, for the first time in my life, to be pulled over by the police.

Southwark Bridge: the only place the police
have ever pulled me over

I hadn't broken any road rules, however, as the cyclophobes might assume. In fact, the policemen were angry that I’d signalled at them to leave me enough space to negotiate safely the junction I’d just passed. A lively discussion ensued as they told me that I – the innocent party – could have caused a crash by waving at them. They had obstructed the junction, I pointed out. There had been nothing to tell them it was a junction, they replied. “Except for the telltale meeting of two roads,” I retorted.

I would have minded the City of London Police's zeal far less, however, had it not contrasted so sharply with the attitude of the police officers I've asked to help me deal with far more serious wrongdoing by motorists. Having been knocked off once in London by a motorist paying no attention, assaulted once by a bus driver and threatened very frighteningly by another motorist, I’ve yet to see anyone lose so much as a single point on his licence as a result of illegal road behaviour around me. It has always been deemed “not in the public interest” to prosecute. Many British cyclists who’ve suffered far more serious incidents have been even worse served.

The emblematic episode for me was a journey home one summer evening along Brixton Road. A series of motorists obstructed the cyclist-only areas along the route, drove too close to me and generally harrassed me – in full view of a British Transport Police car also caught up in the heavy traffic. I eventually concluded it simply couldn't be the job of BTP officers, who police the UK's mainline railways and the London Underground, to deal with illegal driving. But then a cyclist further up the road lost patience with the delays and rode through a set of traffic lights at red. The police car’s flashing lights came on, its siren started and the officers sped up the road after him. The disparity in attitudes was so stark that I briefly contemplated stopping to ask the officers about it - and then, remembering my Southwark Bridge experience, elected to cycle on past.

The question I would have loved to have asked the officers, however, would have been the key one to any discussion of cycling and policing: why do so many police officers worldwide seem to be so alive to the relatively harmless wrongdoing of cyclists and unaware of motorists' far more often deadly misdemeanours? It would have been no less worth asking, I think, because the police officers' faces would probably have looked back at me with blank incomprehension. The injustice, like many worldwide, is, I strongly suspect, mostly a result of subconscious attitudes rather than conscious prejudice.

At least part of the answer lies in the conversation I had with the detective handling the last complaint I made to the Metropolitan Police about a driver’s behaviour – when I reported earlier this year the case of the driver who had threatened me with assault. I complained not only about the driver’s threats but also about his deliberately driving across the path of another cyclist. That incident – which struck me as far more dangerous than his threats to assualt me – must, I’m sure, have been captured on a closed circuit television camera.

New York City traffic. If one of those cars
hits your bike without killing you, the NYPD's message
is simple: fuggeddaboutit.

Yet the detective replied that it would not be “an appropriate use of police resources” to try to track down the footage. I didn't necessarily agree with his decision in my case. But his answer highlighted how, however much one might like to see the police investigate and report to prosecutors every offence they notice, not every red-light jumper will be tracked down, nor will every speeding motorist. Every police force in the world has to make some calculation about where the balance lies between tackling the crimes that most worry its political masters, the concerns of the community it polices and the resources needed to address them. Many of the outcomes are entirely rational. There aren’t many policemen worldwide happy to let murders go unsolved. There are mercifully many who have made their peace with letting litterbugs go unpunished.

The problem is that so few police forces worldwide seem to allocate resources for dealing with crime against cyclists in the way that natural justice for the victims - and the public interest in boosting cycling - would appear to demand. In New York – a city whose affairs are engaging me particularly closely as I’m about to move there – the police department’s policy is not to investigate crashes that look set merely to leave the victims maimed for life, rather than killing them. There are almost no prosecutions in New York for careless driving. Even in London, where the situation is less serious, it remains tempting to conclude many British police forces have dealt with the problem of prosecuting dangerous driving the way that Bunny Colvin, fictional commander of Baltimore’s western district in the TV series The Wire, dealt with drug dealing. They have, to all intents and purposes, legalised it.

The City policemen’s attitude towards me hinted, I think, at the subconscious attitudes involved. They spoke to me on the assumption that I had deliberately endangered myself and others out of ignorance. It took ten minutes of arguing before they realised I had taken the most reasoned, sensible approach I could to negotiating a junction where cyclists’ way across was perpetually blocked by rule-breaking motorists. The starting point seemed to be that I belonged to an out-group, beyond the civilised community they were protecting and too ignorant to handle themselves properly. Most police officers I've encountered seem, by contrast, very alive to the pressures that might make motorists break speed limits, take ‘phone calls while driving or commit other offences. That was certainly the message of the behaviour of the BTP officers I observed. The motorist rule-breaking that they ignored posed some significant threats to others. The cyclist they pursued was riding against the lights across a junction unoccupied by motorists or pedestrians.

Such attitudes, nevertheless, aren’t immutable, to judge by the history of London's Gay Pride march. When the march was first held in 1969 – at a time when nothing the organisers advocated was illegal – police officers accompanying the parade disgracefully barracked those taking part. A contingent of gay police officers, in uniform, takes part in the march now. Cyclists face far less pervasive discrimination than gay people – but a similarly comprehensive revolution in attitudes is required.

The effects of the current attitudes came home to me only last night as I cycled home. As I rode down a four-lane road, I spotted a white van speeding down the kerbside lane towards me, at high speed, illegally undertaking the vehicle in the offside lane. I swung in towards the kerb and stopped, the van only just missing me. When I saw the vehicle again at the next traffic lights, the driver shouted, “Sorry about that, mate”. When I pointed out that he was driving illegally and dangerously, he retorted that I, riding around a metre from the kerb, was to blame for “riding in the middle of the road”.

The driver involved poses a clear danger to cyclists. A rational system, aimed at reducing road deaths, would seek to discourage such driving. A serious approach to complaints from cyclists would be a step in that direction.

That, however, is utterly at odds with the approach of any police force I’ve encountered. There was no prospect, I realised, that the police would take any action against the driver. I decided against even trying to photograph the offending vehicle for fear of provoking another assault that the police would also ignore.

The driver involved might well one day soon kill a cyclist. An open police approach to tackling driving like his might conceivably have encouraged me to report him and led to his behaviour’s being addressed. For the moment, however, it remains far easier to chase after and catch a handful of slow-moving, vulnerable cyclists than tackle the sheer, overwhelming volume of motor vehicle misbehaviour.

In which our hero picks up cycling policy's hottest potato...

Most evenings, as I head home towards reunion with the Invisible Visible Woman, I pedal, as I’ve noted before, in the footsteps of Roman soldiers along London’s Cycle Superhighway 7. But, on nights of the light, misty rain that are a spring and autumn speciality of London’s weather, something unusual happens. As I and other cyclists swing onto a section of the Cycle Superhighway by Kennington Park, we veer out of the marked, blue-painted part of the road that’s meant to be reserved for us. We all know by now that the marking was done on the cheap with a simple layer of blue gloss paint. In such weather, it becomes scarily slippery. We consequently sit towards the outside of the near-side lane. The sight of the line of bikes, all frightened to use a dangerous facility intended to keep us safe, always leads me to raise at least a mental, mildly amused eyebrow.

Roadworks in the City: guess which transport mode
everyone decided was dispensable

I smile a similarly wry inward smile when cycling along any section of pavement (sidewalk, American readers) that’s been divided between pedestrians and cyclists. The standard UK practice is to mark the separate pedestrians and cyclist sides with ridged tiles (to help vision-impaired people). The ridged tiles on the cyclists’ side are laid parallel to the bike’s wheels, however. Those on the pedestrian side run acrossways. A reasonably cautious cyclist consequently has to veer onto the pedestrian side at the tiles, to avoid the small but real danger the ridges will catch his front wheel. Having narrowly missed crashing after catching my wheel a few times on such a tile, I’m unwilling to take more chances.

My main thought as I negotiate these obstacles (or, more properly, “cycle facilities”) is to wonder whether their designers are even vaguely familiar with a bicycle and its basic physical properties. I think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that they might actually regularly ride a velocipede.

However, there’s a second, more serious thought. If this is the rich world’s idea of cycling infrastructure, why are so many cycling organisations pressing for more of it?

Such a notion pitches me, of course, into a bitter intra-cyclist dispute. It echoes, in a way, the divisions everywhere among oppressed groups seeking greater freedom. Do we seek, like pedalling Malcolm Xs, the segregation of the separate cycle facility, using mainly lanes free of our motor-powered oppressors? Or do we pursue peacefully the dream of integration, winning the right to the respect we deserve on the wider, more diverse society of the road?

It’s worth saying, of course, that I am as open as the next person to enjoying a car-free environment. When visiting my parents-in-law, I cycle to their church in north Wales partly on a tarmac path along an old railway line. On a Sunday morning, with few runners or other cyclists about, it can be one of the purest, most uncomplicated bike-riding experiences available. One of the most enjoyable cycle facilities to use in London is a fully segregated cycle lane along Cable Street in the East End. The absence on most of the route of worries about car behaviour is undoubtedly one of its attractions.

It’s the difference in stress levels using such routes that leads admirable campaigners in many countries to demand better, separate cycle provision. In the UK, it’s currently common for such campaigners to say cycling will remain a niche activity for the eccentric few (such as the Invisible Visible Man) until the country boasts the same kind of network of segregated cycle routes as the mass-cycling Netherlands or Denmark. They look at people like me who think there are chances of forging a basic understanding between road users and shake their heads. Isn’t it sad how determined we are to restrict cycling to ourselves and a few other members of the privileged middle classes?

I have, as it happens, a fundamental distrust of the idea of segregating any groups of people that can’t seem to get along. But I’m worried about the practicality of cutting cyclists off from other traffic too.

Nørrebrogade: exhibit A in the segregationists' case

It’s certainly hard to feel too sceptical about segregation standing in the morning on Nørrebrogade, in Copenhagen, the street that carries traffic from the west of Copenhagen over a string of lakes into the city centre. I went to look at it in late 2009 and, even towards the end of the rush hour, there were hundreds of bikes streaming down neat, segregated cycle lanes. Niels Tørsløv, the head of Copenhagen’s city traffic department, told me the city timed the traffic lights to fit in with the flow of bikes, rather than cars. One of the major controversies he was tackling was over the number of cargo bikes in the city. He was having to widen the cycle lanes to make it easier to overtake them. Such are the problems of directing traffic in a city where 37 per cent of people get to work, school or college by bike.

A Copenhagen motorist helpfully illustrates
the Invisible Visible Man's point about side-street conflicts

But, according to Mr Tørsløv, the segregated lanes only rearranged the accidents, putting them at the intersections between roads and cycle paths, rather than at even spaces along the roads. Copenhagen put in the cycle lanes, he said, only because they encouraged people to cycle – cycling numbers rose 10 per cent when a street gained a cycle lane. I happened later the same day to see a motorist knock off a cyclist using a segregated cycle lane.

After that visit, I started to notice, as I sped along Cable Street towards meetings in Canary Wharf, how disproportionately at risk I was from motorists pulling across my path at side streets. I was out of their eye line and difficult to see.

The Invisible Visible Man's hired cruiser bike.
He's not on it - but obviously
drivers saw it like this all the time

My experiences last week in the US (the reason, dear readers, for the late production of this latest blog post) underlined my worries about segregation. Unable to bear any longer missing my bike languishing across the Atlantic, I hired a cheap cruiser bike and headed across the causeway from Miami Beach into downtown Miami proper. I was encouraged at points to see cycle lanes marked on the road. But then I spotted a sign with a bike picture and the words “may use full lane”. This was a rare piece of permission, I realised. The painted lanes were less a facility than a prison, confining me to the fringes of the roads.

Given the number of motorists I’ve already had tell me in Britain that I shouldn’t be outside some rebranded gutter masquerading as a cycle lane, it made me worry what kind of message a heavy concentration on segregated lanes would send. Certain motorists would quickly come to think of on-road cycling as banned.

A whole lane? The City of Miami, for once, spoils cyclists

I’m consequently positioning myself in the middle of the lane, staring round at any potentially menacing drivers - and pedalling my way into the camp that says cyclists and motor vehicles broadly have to coexist in most city streets. This action will, I know, put me, to some advocates, irrevocably in the Not a Good Person camp. They will look upon me henceforth the way a reactionary newspaper columnist would if he had seen me cycle through a red light and mount a pavement, mouthing obscenities.

Yet I’m reluctant to side firmly with either camp because bike behaviour doesn’t seem to me the most important issue on the roads. Watching politicians’ obvious nervousness when discussing road funding in the UK this week has illustrated how fear of drivers continues to drive attitudes about how roads are used. The same fear holds back police forces from tackling speeding, driving while distracted and the other driver behaviour that puts some cyclists off.  After a driver threatened to assault me recently, the police showed no interest in investigating the driving offence that led to the confrontation. The driver had deliberately pulled his car across the path of a cyclist in, I suspect, full view of a CCTV camera. It would have been a “disproportionate use of police resources” to try to retrieve the film.

There doesn’t even seem to be an appetite for explaining the law. Many drivers, I suspect, don’t actually understand they’re not meant to intrude into cycle-only stop areas or that cyclists are allowed to ride outside cycle lanes. It would take too much courage to embark on a simple public information campaign.

Motorists’ attitudes are certainly not immutable – I’ve referred before to the transformation in views about drink driving in many countries as an example. It’s my guess that, if motorists were behaving better, far fewer people would yearn for the apparent sanctuary of segregated lanes. Meanwhile, if the apathetic planners currently in charge in many western countries set about building new cycle infrastructure, it’s a fair bet it would tend more to keep cyclists out of motorists’ way than to help cyclists.

It's unfortunate, too, if the debate polarises advocates into backing two separate approaches. Some places – the busy roads by the Thames in London, for instance – look perfectly set up for separate cycle lanes. The narrow streets in the City of London look best suited to assertive, on-the-road cycling. Many junctions need redesigning. Others would be fine if the current ignored rules were enforced.

But, for the moment, cyclists’ real needs are so far from policy makers’ minds that they’ve built a “Cycle Superhighway” out of stuff that makes bikes skid. I’d prioritise changing motorists’ and officials’ thinking over pressing the same people to build more of their flawed idea of cycling facilities.

Why no man is an island - even in his car

One day in 2001, I was standing by an intersection in Pristina, the monument to dingy Yugoslav urban design that serves as Kosovo’s capital. A souped-up saloon car squeezed inside a vehicle stopped by a set of traffic lights. Then, the moment the lights showed amber, the saloon car’s wheels screamed. It accelerated forward, then swung round in front of the other vehicle. The driver wanted to get ahead as the two cars turned left. The overtaking driver could easily have lost control of his vehicle and spun off the road; he could have hit the other driver as he swung round – and he moved himself only one place up a line of traffic that was probably just going to join a traffic jam further on.

A KLA policeman: tellingly, not looking eager
to tackle Kosovo's traffic culture problem

The following year, I was cycling through the centre of Budapest, then my home city, when a car cut suddenly across my path. Shocked and thinking the driver might simply not have seen me, I slapped a side panel of his car. When the window wound down, the stream of words that issued started “a büdös anyád” (your stinking mother). A general tone thus established, the driver went on to suggest that I shouldn’t be on the road - and that he was well within his rights to act like a homicidal maniac.

The incidents in Pristina and Budapest helped to germinate the seed of an idea that was already planted in my mind. I began increasingly to pay close attention to what light the culture of a country’s roads shed on its wider society. It was illuminating precisely because, to people sitting inside cars, using a road often feels like a purely private enterprise. On busy roads, it is in fact one of the most complex social interactions many human beings undertake.

Budapest: beautiful - but one driver was
misinformed about my mother's personal hygiene

It perhaps wasn’t surprising that Kosovo’s road culture was fairly nihilistic. On a previous visit to Kosovo, shortly after the 1999 war, I had found a farm in western Kosovo whose courtyard was scattered with human ashes and bodies left for the dogs. According to local Albanians, it was the aftermath of a massacre by Serb forces. By the time I saw the bad driving just under two years later, most Kosovo Serbs had left either because of revenge attacks or the expectation of them. The callousness towards others and contempt for the rule of law that had marred Kosovo’s recent history carried straight over, it seemed to me, to how people drove.

Hungary was nothing like as damaged a society as Kosovo – despite the horrors of decades of first right-wing dictatorship and then Communism. But I would regularly report on the miserable living conditions of those who lived in dirty hovels on the edges of towns or run-down bits of Budapest – the country’s gypsies. My experience with the angry motorist – and the boorish tendency of drivers of the most powerful cars on the country’s motorways to drive at speeds that seriously endangered older, slower-moving cars – suggested vulnerable road users attracted similar contempt.

But in Hungary, Kosovo and many other long-misgoverned parts of the world, decades of misrule have discredited both the rule of law and any sense of a wider social good. In such societies, it became heroic to defy even good laws because those imposing them were so distrusted. The negative examples nevertheless suggest something about how road users should conduct themselves in healthier societies. Members of a well-ordered society abide not just by its agreed laws but also by the higher principle that they seek, as far as possible, to respect each other’s interests. They pay particular attention to the interests of the most vulnerable, who are least able to stand up for themselves. They restrain their exercise of their own rights to enhance others’ ability to enjoy theirs.

So we shouldn't be constantly worrying, it seems to me, what others might do to us if we break the rules or behave discourteously. We should all be thinking what our behaviour says about ourselves and our society. If we behave rudely or flout the rules, even if it does no direct harm, we tell those that see us that we are uninterested in their wellbeing. Every time we break road rules, we tell those that see us that we despise the rule of law generally. We’re slowly but surely corroding the bonds that ought to bind us together as a society – and as people who share the limited, precious space our society devotes to roads.

Those who regularly follow the developed world’s controversies over the role of cycling will by now think they know what’s coming. This could easily be the point where I start to bemoan the behaviour of some of my fellow cyclists, shaking my head metaphorically over how those that jump red lights, ride on pavements and so forth besmirch the good name of the rest of us.

My point is, I hope, a bit more subtle. To protect vulnerable road users, it's vital to pay most attention to the vehicles that do most harm. Politicians, police forces and journalists in many countries express outrage at cyclists’ alleged general disrespect for the law. But the less conspicuous law-breaking of motor vehicle drivers – the breaking of speed limits, the driving while distracted by a telephone and the contempt for measures meant to keep cyclists safe – kills thousands of people each year in most developed countries. Many motorists would be surprised how often their fellow motorists even ignore red lights - the failing often, in Britain at least, assumed to be particular to cyclists. I have twice narrowly avoided cars that were simply driving too fast to spot stop lights when I was heading across their paths. The depressing reluctance of many police forces to regard such behaviour as serious and criminal surely leaves vulnerable road users who try to stand up for their rights more exposed.

But there is no point pretending that some cyclists’ behaviour contributes nothing to the malaise. As I argued in a previous blog, cyclists generally harm no-one but themselves if they run red lights, ride on pavements or head the wrong way up a one-way street. Yet motorists or pedestrians seeing such behaviour must surely, to some extent, feel freer to disregard the rules or behave intolerantly themselves. Cyclists have so much potentially to gain from an improvement in road culture that it is surely worth each cyclist’s pondering which way his or her behaviour shifts the delicate balance between tolerance and intolerance on the roads.

It will not solve everything for cyclists to follow the rules. I have previously argued – and still believe – that much anti-cyclist behaviour stems from a simple irritation at cyclists’ choice of an obviously different way of doing things. I have also often been abused for alleged rule breaking when riding (perfectly properly) on on-pavement cycle paths or using one-way streets with a contraflow cycle lane. Some motorists fly into a rage at seeing a cyclist pulling ahead of them into the boxes that are meant to let cyclists leave traffic lights in most British cities ahead of the cars.

But there is a tendency on the part of all road user groups to criticise others for their failure to adhere to the fixed rules of the road – then make up their own minds which rules seriously apply to them. It is a system few people think appropriate with regard to the rules about assault or theft – and one that is no more appropriate about the rules for how people share the roads. Consequently, when I get on board my bike today, I will be looking out for - and trying to obey - traffic lights, one-way street signs and all the other myriad traffic symbols I see about me. It may not directly make my day better. It may not even make me directly safer. But it will reflect my conviction that, because my actions affect a far wider circle of people than myself, I have to respect the only commonly-agreed set of rules that we have.