A speeding cyclist, momentum - and how sustained velocity is the enemy of consideration

Even by the high standards of a fine, late summer morning in New York, the weather was remarkably pleasant on Friday – not too hot or too humid and with a cloudless sky. The view from the Brooklyn Bridge as I rode down into Manhattan, the Financial District’s skyscrapers glinting in the sun, seemed calculated to convince even the most sceptical of the accuracy of New York’s claim to be the greatest city on earth.

 

The Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan
off-ramp: an invitation to let one's
momentum overtake one's manners

But the cyclist who followed me down off the bridge was in no mood to admire the view. As I sat towards the left of the stream of descending bike traffic, seeking a safe opportunity to pass a slower rider I’d been following, I heard a shout of “On Your Right!” Suddenly confused, I nearly clattered into the rider squeezing between me and the railings by the walkway edge. He zipped past me – at a fair rate, given my speedometer was reading 18mph – and swung into the walkway’s crowded pedestrian side to round the guy in front. Then he disappeared off down the slope.

But he went on his way, I imagine, feeling a little more stressed than he’d been anticipating. “Idiot!” I shouted at him as he sped past. “You shouldn’t be…” he shouted before finishing the sentence with an angry gesture towards where I’d been sitting in the lane as I tried to pass the rider in front.

It was the kind of clash I’ve experienced a disproportionate number of times over the last week, as I’ve returned to New York cycle commuting after two weeks’ vacation on Cape Cod. Time and again, I’ve encountered people who’ve been utterly determined to conserve the momentum of their car, or bicycle or walking or running body at the expense of others’ safety and convenience. All seemed caught up in the idea that the complex social activity of sharing a road or path was a private enterprise, where one needn’t take account of others.

I’ve also, however, been struck by the power of fellow feeling with the road users around me to influence my own and other people’s behaviour. People caught up in the bubble of their own, desperate need to reach their meeting or soccer practice or date or whatever can transform back into normal, civil civilians the moment that they recognise how they're threatening someone else.

The contrast has been so striking that I’m currently seeing nearly everything I encounter on the roads as a conflict between these two instincts – to set one’s own pace and to treat others as one would like to be treated oneself. Every journey, I’m spotting people caught up in the excitement of their own speed and a reluctance to change it. Every journey, I’m spotting how a glance into another person’s eyes brings daylight and a sense of the wider world into that tunnel vision.

I’ve been reading some news items through the same prism. I was horrified by how proud a driver calling himself Afroduck was of his “achievement”of driving a circuit round Manhattan’s expressways in 24 minutes. As a Christian – and currently an adherent of a Presbyterian congregation – I was profoundly disappointed by reports of a lobby of Free Church of Scotland ministers to the Scottish government on widening of the A9 road serving some of the Free Church’s highland strongholds and the installation of speed cameras on the road. "Frustration" with slow cars caused more accidents than fast ones, claimed Rev Colin Macleod, who I fear didn’t ask himself how Jesus would drive a car. "Speed cameras... will lead to more frustration, more accidents and more funerals," Rev Macleod told The Scotsman.

However, it was an incident the night before that close Brooklyn Bridge pass that made clear to me the tension between the two tendencies. As I rode up Warren St in TriBeCa, I saw a BMW trying to cut across my path by pulling across the cycle lane at an intersection and into the stream of cars. As I arrived at the traffic lights, I pulled firmly into the driver’s path, looked down towards his open window, signalled to him to stop and said, “Please wait.” Somewhat to my surprise, he did.

 

A warning to cyclists on Kent Avenue, Williamsburg:
a reluctance to yield at junctions comes from the same
desire to conserve momentum as bad overtaking.

But, after he passed me and we carried on down the street towards City Hall, I noticed another cyclist riding into a temporarily narrowed section of road by some road works. Unconstrained by any personal interaction, the BMW driver barged past him in the narrow section. The rider’s arms flew up in exasperation and fear as the driver passed him with inches to spare. It was only the rider’s quick reactions that prevented his being battered into the concrete barriers, with potentially serious consequences.

It’s hardly surprising, however, that so many road users are so keen to conserve their momentum. It’s one of the great joys of piloting any vehicle – a car or especially a bicycle – to feel one’s moving at speed without having to make an effort. It’s no coincidence that I regularly hear businessmen speaking in the wooden-tongued jargon of contemporary American business describing their company as having “momentum”. It’s what political campaigns seek too. There’s a pleasure in that feeling of being carried along by the effort one’s already made, or by gravity or the wind that adds up to far more than merely the product of one’s mass multiplied by one’s velocity. I’ve described myself the pleasure of a downhill run on one of New York’s East River bridges when clear of obstructions. The desire to maintain one’s momentum comes, I suspect, from some of the deepest, most primitive bits of the brain, which house our deepest joys and fears.

There’s a serious discipline, meanwhile, involved in applying one’s brakes to suit another person. All the pleasures of feeling that onward progress disappear. It’s an effort to get going again. As the story of the barging bicyclist of the Brooklyn Bridge shows, it’s a discipline that cyclists often struggle to exercise. Yet, of course, the danger from people driving motor cars is all the greater. Someone shut inside a metal box is apt to be insulated – as Afroduck seemingly was – from the sheer danger that his or her speed represents to others. Drivers are consequently likely to behave more dangerously.

Cars zip down 8th Avenue, in Park Slope:
how conscious are the drivers of each others' humanity?

There is, nevertheless, joy in exercising that discipline. I’ve been trying especially hard since realising how much I enjoy my own momentum to stop for pedestrian crosswalks even when most other cyclists don’t. The tense faces of people glancing up and down the Hudson Greenway waiting for a gap in the bike traffic melt into a smile when they realise someone’s halted for them. There’s an inner satisfaction from knowing that one isn’t going to pass another cyclist before there’s enough, safe room for it and that one’s unlikely consequently to scare the other rider. I’ve long tried to exercise the same discipline on the rare occasions I drive a car, knowing how fearful cars can make me when they pass too fast or close.

It’s a far less visceral pleasure than the rush that Afroduck would have experienced from rounding Manhattan at an average speed of 66mph. It’s the kind of behaviour that can exasperate people who feel they must get past at any cost. Freud would have said it’s an action motivated by the superego, while the pleasure of speed belongs to the id.

Yet to use one’s brakes to act considerately towards others is also to recognise a profound truth about roads, cycle paths and all the other places that people use vehicles close to each other. They’re places that pitch us into some of the most complex social interactions possible. When so many people treat those places as if they were their own private domains, it’s no surprise so many of the people around them – the people whose reality they’re ignoring – end up getting killed.

A dead mayor, a live cycling boom - and why cycling might be back to stay

For new residents of New York City like me, there has been something almost mind-bending about the last couple of days. Ever since Ed Koch, the city’s mayor from 1977 to 1989, died in the early hours of Friday, obituaries have been transporting us back to an unrecognisable city. Drug addicts lie prone on Manhattan streets, looting breaks out when the power fails and the subway is celebrated mainly for the range and inventiveness of its graffiti. It’s hardly surprising that the person who pitted himself against this chaos had a personality as pathologically extroverted as our current mayor’s is buttoned-up and controlled.

Sixth Avenue: bike-lane-less, as Ed Koch
preferred it on mature consideration

But, for a newcomer who’s a cyclist, one detail of the Ed Koch saga highlights a particularly striking change in the city. In 1980, at the height of the second oil price shock, Koch ordered the installation of segregated bike lanes on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues and Broadway in Manhattan. Then, only weeks later, having been ridiculed for his bike lane “fetish,” Koch had the lanes torn out again. He went on, in 1987, to try to ban cycling altogether from mid-town Manhattan. While that set-back took years to overcome, Koch nevertheless died in a city criss-crossed by a growing network of bike lanes. Installation is moving – despite setbacks as Nimbys in some neighbourhoods oppose new lanes - so fast that my 2012 NYC cycling map already feels quite badly out of date.

Thinking about that sharp turnaround – a tribute to the commitment of Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor, and Janette Sadik-Khan, his transport commissioner - has linked up in my mind several hopeful signs for cycling over the last couple of months. In both the US and the UK – the countries where I’ve done most cycling – cycling numbers are going up and official acceptance of cycling appears to be growing.

The question is whether this is a fundamental, long-term shift or just another short-term bit of faddism like Ed Koch's.

A Detroit Madison Street: borrowed chic for Lincoln

The question brings to my mind a mental picture of a copper-and-black Detroit Bicycle Company fixed-wheel bike. As someone who likes both gears and highly practical bikes, it’s not a machine I aspire to own. But I came across the bike – a Detroit Madison Street, trivia fans – in the unlikely setting of the Lincoln stand at Detroit’s annual North American International Auto Show. It was being held up as an example of the kind of finely-made luxury product of which Lincoln – which is trying to relaunch itself as a desirable luxury marque – approved.

Still more remarkably, it was one of quite a few bikes I spotted around the show floor.  The Smart stand boasted an E-Bike, which the manufacturer will be selling, while Toyota displayed a concept for a conventional bike. Kia was showing a small-wheeled bike that it sells in Korea, while Hyundai had a fixed-wheel bike sticking out the  back of a coupe. Subaru had stuck a couple of mountain bikes on the roof rack of one of its vehicles.

The unmistakeable impression was that carmakers thought bikes now had a certain cachet – which they wanted to borrow. Compare that with how the UK’s Raleigh in the 1960s felt it had to ape motorbike design to get kids to ride bikes.

The bikes’ presence on the automakers’ stands struck me all the more forcibly because of an article I’d written in my day job just before Christmas. It detailed how all the Detroit Three big automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – were struggling to reverse or live with recent years’ steep decline in young people’s learning to drive and subsequent buying of cars. Part of the carmakers’ problem stems from a gradual revival in recent years of the US’s inner cities – which are less littered than they once were with unconscious drug addicts - and, for some of the residents, a drift away from cars and towards bicycles. It’s the kind of gain for cycling that would have been scarcely imaginable in most industrialised countries 25 years ago when Mayor Koch was trying to ban cycling altogether.

A YouTube video posted by Gaz, a keen helmet-cam user reminded me that the process has already gone far further in the UK. His video – shot one recent January day – showed 50 cyclists on one short stretch of Cycle Superhighway 7 (a former Roman road, as it happens). If so many people are cycle commuting in January, Gaz suggests, the spring and summer are likely to see London’s highest cycle commuting numbers in many years.

Kent Ave, Williambsurg: Denis Hamil wants
those bike lanes gone

The worry, of course, is that cycling also looked so much like the coming thing in 1980 that a gadfly populist such as Ed Koch briefly took the risk of backing it. If car companies thought there was a way other than sticking two bikes on the roofrack to show their car was associated with an outdoor, aspirational lifestyle, I’m sure they’d happily use it. Denis Hamil, a columnist in the New York Daily News last week said he would support any mayoral candidate who promised to scrap the current crop of bike lanes. One of the likeliest contenders for mayor – Christine Quinn, a Democrat – has sought to appease bike lane haters by saying lanes are “controversial” and advising people not to discuss them at dinner parties.

In London, even Boris Johnson, the mayor, who is a daily cyclist, fell before the last mayoral election into the trap of caricaturing cyclists as dread-locked red-light jumpers. As with road safety – where the current UK government has reversed years of steady improvements by cutting funding for speed cameras – there is always a risk that someone will take steps that reverse apparently inexorable progress in a positive direction.

It doesn’t, for what it’s worth, feel as if such a step is coming immediately either here in New York or in the UK. Concern about the environment, changes in living patterns, concern about health and cycle technology improvements are all conspiring to make this cycling boom feel far more solid and longer-lasting than the second oil shock one.

Yes, cycling's made progress. But, as long as FedEx drivers
think across one of  New York's busiest bike lanes is a good place
to park, it won't be mainstream

But it’s worth remembering that, even after recent years’ quadrupling of New York cycling numbers and the last decade’s doubling in London, riding a bike remains a fringe pursuit that’s far from winning mainstream acceptance.

That point came home to me particularly clearly one Friday night just before Christmas. Riding home around 10pm down W55th street from my office, I was surprised to find a limousine pull up next to me and wind down its window. Inside was a curious tourist who couldn’t understand what I was doing. No, I told him, I wasn’t delivering anything. Yes, I was just riding home from my office.

Recognising that he wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it, he finally said: “Just seems kind of… European.”

The incident set a new mental benchmark for me for cycling in New York and other big cities where it’s still not one of the main modes of travel. Cycling, I’ve decided, will finally be mainstream when an encounter with a commuter cyclist is no longer one of the “darndest things about New York” that a returning tourist recounts to his friends in Peoria.

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.

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.

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.

The minister who made the Invisible Visible Man see red

It was the kind of reasoning you’d expect from someone who has spent so long trying to reconcile competing instincts and priorities that he’d lost all track of common sense. One summer several years ago, over lunch with a junior transport minister in the then UK government, I asked about the future of speed cameras - cameras for catching speeding motorists that his own government’s research showed saved more than a hundred lives every year. Putting on a serious voice and knitting his brows, the minister – who clearly disapproved of the official support for the cameras - told me that motorists were worried about speed cameras’ effectiveness because of the “regression to mean” effect. The effect describes how part of the fall in accidents at a given site after a camera’s installation is probably a statistical quirk, rather than a result of the camera’s presence.

I tried – but didn’t fully succeed – to control my irritation. I told the minister – forcefully – that in my experience far more motorists were simply worried about being caught speeding. They didn’t have intellectual doubts about speed cameras – they just thought they should be allowed to drive whatever speed they damn well pleased. The minister clearly didn’t think it was important to enforce speed limits.

Cyclists on Lower Thames Street, London Skyride 2009.
They're their "own worst enemies",  according to one minister -
yet they seem oblivious to the danger.

The minister’s understanding for rule-breaking motorists did not, however, extend to cyclists. I went on to ask what the government was doing to make roads safer for cyclists. “To be honest,” he replied, “I think cyclists are their own worst enemies”. I had little doubt I had much, much worse enemies on the roads than myself – and I had encountered several even during my short cycle ride to lunch. I nearly – but  didn’t quite – follow the inner urge to get myself out of the presence of someone who thought I wasn’t worth protecting. It would all have been less alarming if he hadn’t been the road safety minister.

The lunch was the moment when I started to realise how completely the thinking about road use of most people – even those who devote their days to deciding on road safety policy – comes from the gut, rather than the higher brain centres. The minister’s gut wanted to drive fast – I later discovered he had a number of convictions for speeding – and disliked cyclists. My gut, clearly, likes cycling and doesn’t care for driving. But I like to think my frontal cortex at least gets to review the gut’s decisions. I recognised – I still recognise – that lots of people need to drive, that motor vehicles are not about to stop being the main means of making most trips in the UK – or most other parts of the world – and that even the keenest cyclist has to find some modus vivendi with the dominant road users. It was depressing to find a government minister relying so thoroughly on the lower reaches of his abdomen that he was holding two utterly contradictory views.

But anyone who’s spent any significant time cycling anywhere where cycling is a fringe activity will know that cyclists scratch out feelings from well below some people's civilised veneers. Some motorists’ determination to get past cyclists just to reach the end of the traffic jam ahead faster; the curious determination of some pedestrians to step in front of cyclists even when they can see the cyclist clearly; the daily battles over precedence in the special boxes for cyclists at traffic lights: these all betoken a gut distaste for cyclists that doesn’t seem based on detailed perusal of road casualty rates.

Nevertheless, it is probably worth laying out clearly how intellectually disreputable the minister’s views were. In 2010, 1,850 people died on the UK’s roads – and only four were killed by cyclists. In each of 2008 and 2009, only a single pedestrian died after being hit by a bicycle. Cyclists – who account for just under 2 per cent of traffic but far more in the urban areas where most accidents occur – consequently were responsible for just 0.22 per cent of 2010’s road user fatalities. The proportion had been still lower the two preceding years. Even among pedestrians – the only group of road users that cyclists seriously threaten – cyclists accounted for fewer than 1 per cent of the 405 killed. Other road users, meanwhile, killed 111 cyclists.

Me in cycling gear: a sight, one reporter says,
that ought to terrify pedestrians. Note to motorist
readers: since you won't be able to see me, I'm near
the picture's middle, wearing high-visibility clothing

These figures, of course, are rather as simple Newtonian physics would suggest. The energy released when a single cyclist hits a pedestrian at, say, 15mph and when a car, van or lorry hits a pedestrian at 30mph are many orders of magnitude different. I can testify to this point particularly congently after unwillingly conducting my own experiment in early 2009. On February 4, I was knocked off by a glancing blow from a minivan crossing my path on Brixton Road, south London. On March 13 the same year, I was hit squarely by a cyclist running a red light near Elephant & Castle. The minivan incident left me sore for a year – the collision with the cyclist only a few days. Cyclists running red lights, going the wrong way up one-way streets and mounting pavements are an irritation – but little more. Motorists who speed, talk on their telephones, fail to see red lights or deliberately drive dangerously regularly prove a lethal danger.

Politicians who want to make life safer for pedestrians and other road users should consequently be encouraging cycling, even if cyclists continue to run red lights (which I think they shouldn’t) or mount the occasional pavement. We cyclists represent far less of a danger to other road users than any other form of wheeled transport.

Yet, when I spoke to Lord Adonis, the then newly-appointed transport secretary, in mid-2009 along with another transport correspondent, the other reporter turned beetroot red when I asked about enhancing safety for cyclists. He interrupted before the minister could answer. “What are you going to do about aggressive cyclists?” he demanded. “What aggressive cyclists?” I retorted, pointing out that people perched on metal frames and two wheels were in a weak position to be truly, dangerously aggressive. My theories about what drives such anger will have to wait, however, for another post. It will take some space to explain why some people hate others simply for their choice of transport mode…

The Invisible Visible Man

I am 1m 93cm tall and weigh 110kg – a weight that, despite my substantial height, makes the National Health Service think I’m nearly part of the obesity epidemic. Although I grew up in Glasgow, I have never, unlike most Glaswegian men, been addressed in the street as “Jimmy”. When you look like me, you’re “big man”.

A London Cycle Campaign photo of my
rear proves my essential invisibility.
I am the vehicle on the left, if you can see me.

Yet, surprisingly, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on a bright silver helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. My sudden invisibility has led me twice to be battered into the road by cars whose drivers claimed not to have seen me – and to have had countless uncomfortably close encounters with others.

The snag is that, as soon as I in any way impede a motor vehicle, I not only seem to reappear but to assume for drivers proportions still larger and more lumbering than my real self. I’m suddenly an elephant, incapable of speed, out of place on an urban street and committing the unpardonable sin of Making a Motorist Moderate his Speed.

The Brooklyn Bridge Cycle Lane:
the Invisible Visible Man would put
a clever caption here - but he's lost in a reverie
about becoming a New York cycle commuter

I nevertheless, year in, year out, get on my bike on sunny days and rainy, when it’s freezing outside and uncomfortably hot, hunch my body over my drop handlebars and every year cycle around 4,000 miles – 6,400 kilometres. I am now nervous about any life change that might make me give this activity up. When it briefly looked as if I might move to Johannesburg, I seriously investigated the prospects for getting around one of the world’s most crime-ridden, sprawling cities by bicycle. Turns out it would have presented some problems. When I think about the possibility of moving to New York, I am, in truth, mainly day-dreaming about my potential cycle commute. I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge once and want the film of my life to show me speeding daily along the cycle lane over that piece of 19^th century engineering magnificence.

I am a husband and a father. I am a Christian and, more specifically, an Anglican. I make my living by writing. But being a cyclist is no longer anywhere near as far behind those other core elements of my identity as a choice about personal transport ought to be.

This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why that is. I hope along the way to provide some cheap entertainment – nearly all of it at the expense of my absurd self.

…………………………………………………………………….

The funny thing I’ve realised is that I don’t get much simple enjoyment out of cycling. My wife is endlessly frustrated at the number of times I arrive home jumpy or angry after some confrontation with a taxi driver or close shave with a motorist. I long to explain to some of them that a road lane with a cyclist in it is actually still occupied. On one memorable occasion, a bus driver assaulted me. Long story short, he hadn’t enjoyed being reminded that the special area for bicycles at many British traffic junctions is not intended for buses. The bad news for him: there was probably no other cyclist on that road that night who not only personally knew, but had the email address of, his bus company’s chief executive.

I’m a cautious cyclist – a cautious person, in truth. I find the regular threats from such motorists a real and recurring source of worry. I wake sometimes in the early hours and go over incidents. What if I hadn’t managed to control that wobble? What if I hadn’t managed to stay just ahead of that motorist who deliberately drove too close behind me? What if I hadn’t controlled that skid? Will I one day feel my life slipping away, bathetically, as I lie on some piece of south London tarmac because of a BMW driver’s bravado? The thoughts gnaw away at my guts – and I gaze with incomprehension at my fellow cyclists who squeeze through the narrowest gaps, shoot lights or ride without lights. I’m constantly surprised at myself for tolerating far smaller risks.

Not, of course, that there aren’t moments. My parents-in-law live in Cheshire and attend church 20km away in north Wales. When I set off at 9.30 on a Sunday morning, the main road near their house is quiet and straight. I can cover the first 12km or so at an average of 32kph. My body, normally so lumbering and clumsy, feels on a good day at one with the bike. It reminds me of a claim I once heard – whose veracity I’ve never established – that the bicycle is the world’s most efficient machine. So much of the effort I put in seems to turn itself into forward motion.

My bike: speak ill of this machine and I may well weep

One warm day in 2008, I remember arriving in Ipswich from London on a train with my bike, heading for Felixstowe to undertake an interview. Told the train onward to Felixstowe had been cancelled, I had to cycle – and sped 14 miles on pleasant, quiet roads across the Suffolk countryside, feeling an entirely unanticipated lightness of heart. I experience a little surge of excitement when one company I regularly cover tells me it has an executive visiting London it would like me to meet. The meetings are always on the far side of Hyde Park from my offices and afford a chance – a legitimate chance, sanctioned by work needs – to speed along Rotten Row, a cycle and pedestrian path south of the Serpentine. Some of London’s best architecture fringes the park as I bowl along across the vast open spaces. Once a month or so, a day dawns clear, dry and bright and my morning ride to work passes in a surge of endorphins, my bike sliding smoothly around the traffic, unimpeded by motor vehicles and unharrassed by angry van drivers.

To move onto the fastest gears on my bike, I push the left-hand brake lever on my handlebars – the one that controls the rear brake - to the right. It shifts the chain onto the outermost, largest chain ring by the pedals. The noise involved – grind-grind-grind-grind-click! – could be my favourite sound in the world. It’s ugly on its own – but, as surely as one of Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of the buzzer, my brain knows that sound signifies a stretch of open road or gentle downhill and the joy of a rapid acceleration. It’s ultimately a very simple, childish joy – not much more complicated, really, than the chance to say to oneself, “Whee!”

I’ve become an inveterate cyclist partly, no doubt, because I’m chasing that feeling. To return to Pavlov’s salivating dogs, it’s well established that, when an animal receives a reward for pecking at a hole, pushing a button or whatever, it will keep doing so far longer after the reward stops if the reward has been intermittent than reliable. The insight explains the persistence of gambling and other kinds of addiction. People keep pursuing elusive rewards for longer than they do predictable ones. It’s the promise of another surprise, perfect run into work that keeps one slogging through the rain, confrontations with angry van drivers and sheer hard slog.

But there’s more to it than that. I wonder, ultimately, if I’m really looking for fun in life. I think, instead, that I spend a great deal of time chasing the satisfaction of having put in an effort and accomplished something. It makes me work silly hours at my job, chasing the vindication of having beaten other newspapers to a story, seeing my name on the front page or simply having produced a nicely-crafted description of some unpromising container port or laid-up ship. It gives me a charmless earnestness I’ve been imposing on others since childhood. I recall being reprimanded by someone in my university hall of residence after I tried to start a conversation about some complex point of our moral philosophy course. It was, she remarked reasonably if a little snappily, breakfast.

The need to put in effort sits conjoined in me, I think, with a need to engage with the world. I’ve had an impulse as long as I can remember to grab the world by the lapels and try to tell it about this new thing that’s happened, this new music to listen to, the way this ship works or God.

Cycling ticks all the boxes for someone with such needs – and then some. The “I made it” feel on dismounting one’s bicycle after a difficult journey seems to be for me a more powerful reinforcer than the feeling of mere excitement after an enjoyable ride. The physical effort of shoving down with my thighs to slog myself to the end of some trip I should probably have undertaken by train soothes some deep anxiousness inside me. No-one can say I haven’t tried hard enough. When my need for such satisfaction is at its height, I constantly check the mileage recorded on my bicycle computer. I feel far happier and more content when my daily average cycling distance sits comfortably above 11 miles.

The sense of engagement with the world – the wind in my face, the smell of the petrol fumes, the snatches of conversation from passing pedestrians – only heighten the satisfaction. It’s one of the factors that appeals to many people about motoring – the car’s ability to become a moving extension of one’s own home, cut off from those around – that most puts me off owning a car. The depth of this feeling struck me recently when on a cold day I found my hands unexpectedly warm in my full-finger gloves – the rarely-used cycling gloves that cover my whole hand. I was shocked at the calm I felt on switching to my normal cycling gloves, with cut-off finger ends. I could once again feel the wind over my fingers. I was in touch with the world.

I believe in theory in doing things for good, positive reasons, inspired by rational thinking. There are rational reasons for cycling. I’m fitter than I otherwise would be, less prone to illness and pumping out fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than a non-cyclist I would. But, when I wake up on a rainy morning with a headache in a foul mood, those positive reasons aren’t what count. It’s the fear of losing those deeper satisfactions – the sense of having put in the right effort, the feeling of being in touch with the world – that get me out onto the road on my bike: the invisible, high-viz man.