Reported Road Casualties Great Britain - Definitions, symbols and
conventions
Readers who’ve read as far back as the first post on this blog – posted in the now long-ago days of January 20 – may recall that I
fretted about my prospects of one day feeling my life slipping away on some
south London road because of the foolish bravado of some BMW driver. It was
melodramatic, I admit – I started feeling more secure on the roads shortly
afterwards, when I replaced my worn Schwalbe Marathon Pluses with new, better-gripping ones.
But I now realise I should have been thinking just as hard
about the prospect I might find myself slipping into an irreversible coma.
After my second-last post on this blog, about whether cycling was part of the traditional philosophical conception of the Good Life,
I emailled Gordon Graham, the philosopher who introduced me 24 years ago to the
idea of the Good Life, to see what he made of the piece. Prof Graham, now at
Princeton Theological Seminary, was generous enough to say he’d enjoyed the
post but asked a question: were my data incomplete? Prof Graham wondered if,
perhaps, while motorists were far less likely than cyclists to die on the
roads, they might be more prone to injury.
Pedestrians, albeit not in the UK: set to get fewer smug looks
from the Invisible Visible Man
The gloomy answer, on investigation in the Department for Transport statistics, is that there’s actually an especially high proportion of
serious injuries to deaths for cyclists. And I don’t like the sound of a
serious injury. It’s “an injury for which a
person is detained in hospital as an in-patient, or any of the following
injuries whether or not they are detained in hospital: fractures, concussion,
internal injuries, crushings, burns (excluding friction burns), severe cuts,
severe general shock requiring medical treatment and injuries causing death 30
or more days after the accident”.
In 2010, there were, I
calculate, 23.96 serious injuries to cyclists for every fatality, 11.86
for motorbikes, 10.67 for car occupants and 12.84 for pedestrians. The only
good news is that a broken wrist or severe shock is enough to get you into
company with people who die after six weeks in a coma – and that cycling still
looks much safer than riding a motorbike. For every billion vehicle kilometres,
553 cyclists were killed or seriously injured in 2010, against 1,021
motorcyclists, 322 pedestrians and 15 people in cars.
While cycling is still less likely than many people assume to kill you, you've got a relatively higher chance of being hurt badly. If something makes it through the steel shell of a car, meanwhile, there's a relatively high chance it's going to kill you.
The health and environmental benefits still mean I’m
pedalling towards the Good Life, I reckon. But I’ll be looking that little bit
less smugly at the pedestrians as I go there.
Do the new figures change your minds about whether cycling is part of the Good Life? Do please comment below.
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 KenningtonPark, 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.
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.
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.
It wasn’t until recently that I discovered why, on a good
night, I was able to cycle so fast for a lot of my journey home. I’d previously
noticed only that south London
boasted a striking number of wide, straight roads that let me, when traffic was
light, put my head down, slip into higher gears and cruise at around 30
kilometres an hour. Then I happened in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England: South London on a casual reference to Kennington Park Road’s
having started as a Roman road. When my bike’s wheels rolled along Cycle Superhighway 7, I realised, they were going where legionaries once marched in plumed helmets between the camps of Londinium and Sussex.
It has been one of the joys of my ten-and-a-half years of
cycling in London
to have gained a far clearer sense of how the city fits together. When I arrived
mole-like at my destination from the underground, I used to peer myopically at
each area in isolation from its neighbours. As a cyclist, I no longer feel Covent Garden is cut off from Holborn or Old Street from
Bank.
Cycling has also, however, led me to encounter so many
ghosts from the city’s past – from its foundation under the Romans to its last
hundred years of struggle against adversity - that it feels almost human to me. Londinium, Lundenwic, Lundenburh or London has been knocked down, slaughtered by
disease, moved, neglected, shaken by violence, burnt and bombed. But it has consistently
struggled back – a stubborn, punch-drunk heavyweight willing himself back into
the ring.
The story began in periods of history that archaeologists’
trowels are only slowly unearthing. It has continued up until events that I
have witnessed and reported upon. It will continue in all likelihood when I am
as forgotten as the millions of others who have come to London to make something of themselves,
enjoyed the city’s excitements, cursed its frustrations and died.
Westminster Abbey: inspires awe, but
not much reverence
It’s probably fitting that I never come across much from a
while after the era of London’s
Roman founders – they were the dark ages, after all. Nor do I get particularly
worked up about the great monuments from just after 1066’s Norman conquest. Westminster
Abbey certainly fills me with the intended awe. The oddness of my pedalling
past the still-solid, 900-year-old Tower
of London – a fortress built amid a
still not wholly-tamed England
– occasionally strikes me. But it’s the less obvious monument of Charterhouse Square, by
Smithfield Market, that gives me the fullest sense of encountering my medieval London forebears.
I often swing to the right near the square when returning to
the office from north of the City. It’s one of the tranquil, genteel oases
still hiding among the office towers and bustle of the world’s leading
international financial district. But the square has properly occupied my
attention only since I read, a few months ago, about its role in the Black
Death. The site of the square, I discovered, had been a mass grave, filled in
1348 with the bodies of tens of thousands of
Londoners. Half the city’s inhabitants died.
The Barbican:full of Black Death ghosts
trapped, possibly, in the impossible-to-navigate
walkways
I was seized with a mental picture of some prosperous woman,
just widowed but feeling the disease’s first symptoms herself, knowing she
might have as little as a day to write her will. The story didn’t play out in
my mind, however, among the muddy, chaotic streets of plague-ridden, 14th
century London
but somehow amid the 1970s concrete of the Barbican Centre, just across Aldersgate Street
from the plague pit.
The city would heave itself up on the ringside ropes after
the Black Death, nevertheless, suck in more newcomers and carry on. The neat
Tudor brickwork of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Palace, which I swoop
past on my way from home to central London, reminds me of a high point – when England’s new self-confidence first led the country
to look far beyond its shores.
Yet the ghosts of the people have more power to surprise my
unwary emotions.
St Paul's churchyard:look closely and the New Model Army is
trudging up the hill towards you
It was outside my son’s nursery that I suddenly found myself
amid the English Civil War. I haul him most mornings in a trailer to the
nursery, in a Clapham church. I detach the trailer for his nanny to bring home,
kiss him goodbye and prepare to head off. Then, as I retrieved my bike one
morning, my eye happened on a new notice. It explained how the churchyard had
received the area’s plague dead. It had also subsequently expanded to hold the
Roundhead dead from the Civil War battle of Battersea marshes.
Battersea Power Station: art deco amid Civil War ghosts
I could see from where I stood modern Battersea, below the
hill I sometimes freewheel down en route to Chelsea. The famous power station casts its
art deco bulk over the whole area. The TelecomTower punctuates the skyline. I could nevertheless suddenly sense the parliamentary army’s
remnants slogging their way up the hill towards me, their breath hanging in the
air over their severe, round helmets, their dead piled in carts behind.
This place – the first dry, flat place they reached – would not permit a very dignified
burial for the fallen. But it would have to do.
It’s not the only reminder of 17th century
tragedy I encounter. A pedal up the steep cobbles of Pudding Lane brings me to the monument to
the Great Fire, the destroyer of vast tracts of the city. In 1665, the year
before the fire, the bubonic plague for the last time had killed thousands of
Londoners en masse.
St Paul's: Sir Christopher Wren gives
possibly the finest two-finger salute in history to fate
However, London not only
recovered from those twin catastrophes but showed it with the monumental bulk of
St Paul’s
Cathedral. I cycle in its shadow to meetings with the City’s bankers and
lawyers, marvelling at how my forebears showed such a magnificent two fingers
to fate.
Then again, a lot of what I encounter from the next two centuries
reeks of audacious confidence. The neat Georgian terraces I cycle between on Kennington Road;
the mile after mile of Victorian villas I pass with my family at weekends: they
all suggest a robust optimism about the future impossible to imagine feeling
now. The wonder is perhaps that it survived so long in a Victorian London occasionally swept by
cholera and continually disgraced by some inhabitants’ poverty.
The Cable Street mural commemorates the battle: you have
my permission to think it sentimentalises a complex event.
The buildings constructed after the shock
of the first world war puff their chests out far less. A mural that I pass on my way down Cable Street towards
CanaryWharf is a reminder of how the clouds started gathering again afterwards. It commemorates how Communists and other anti-fascists in 1936 violently resisted
efforts to push through the mainly-Jewish East End
a march by fascist blackshirts. I still come across partially unhealed second world war wounds. Whole communities were smashed. In
exchange for their ruined houses, they got either the grim, poorly-built postwar housing I often cycle past, or exile to new towns.
Nevertheless, it’s the smallest scars – the points, like the
ones on my own street, where one or two post-war houses intrude into a
Victorian terrace – that bring home the human drama. As I pedal
past such spots, I imagine how a bomber,
full of frightened young men desperate to make it back to Germany, dropped its
unused bombs there to escape faster. On their tails would have been young
British or Polish or Canadian fighter pilots – just as scared, presumably, but fired
up with the need to defend Europe’s last big,
free, democratic city. It must have been impossible for the bereaved not to wish that the bomb had fallen somewhere else, on a house not full of their loved ones or their possessions.
Those events are easier to understand, of course, because
they remain in living memory. A video showing at the Museum of London
includes one woman’s account of how her 12-year-old brother went to buy a drink
in the local Woolworth store in New Cross in 1944. He was one of 168 killed
when a German V2 rocket hit it. “They didn’t find much of him,” she says, sadly.
An older friend has told me how her house was destroyed by a German bomb – and
the disorienting sensation of seeing her bedroom exposed to the elements.
But I appreciate the past traumas all the more because of a
memory of my own. I was standing in the street by Edgware Road underground station, my
bicycle in one hand, peering at a television in a shop window. I had been
assuming, as I cycled over there to investigate reports of explosions on the
underground, that they were down to some problem with the underground’s power. Immediately I saw a bus had exploded, I knew instantly, in my head and my stomach, what must be going on. Near me dead in the underground station lay
seven of my fellow Londoners – a handful of the 52 who would die – and Mohammad
Sidique Khan, one of four suicide bombers.
It made me warmer towards London, I think, to cycle round that day and
take in the dazed looks on my fellow Londoners’ faces amid the echoing sirens and the beat of the helicopters overhead. London’s tolerance of
diversity may be expressed in a cool, arm’s length fashion rather than a fuzzy embrace. But, as more cyclists joined me on the roads in the coming
weeks, scared of the underground or facing disruption from line closures, I
valued the city’s live-and-let-live tradition all the more for knowing how
others hated it.
This isn’t, I hope, to sentimentalise a city that’s probably
been hard work since the Romans first spotted a good place to cross the Thames. Londoners rioted murderously against
giving Roman Catholics civil rights, backed the blackshirts as well as the
resisters at Cable Street and used sometimes to hang signs reading “no dogs, no
blacks, no Irish” in boarding house windows. Many of my fellow Londonders, as I’ve argued before on this blog, currently need to revise their attitude
towards cyclists.
But, even when the streets teem with the super-efficient
bikes of the future, such a big, intense city will never achieve perfection.
There were, presumably, rows once between Roman wagoners and charioteers over
priority in Londinium’s cramped streets. The first cyclists, I imagine, were
abused for scaring the horses.
Yet, if it’s a flawed work in progress, it’s at least a work
in progress built by now on the rich experiences of tens of millions of my
forebears, people whose traces are there for anyone who pays attention to see.
I shall look around, next time I’m the target of some taxi driver’s or white
van man’s rage, for such a sign and imagine the person who left it. “Forget
it,” he or she will tell me, “the city will long outlive you both.”
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.
Watching television some years ago, I happened upon an
advert that used home video footage from the childhood of Lance Armstrong, the
winner eventually of more Tours de France than any other cyclist. Young Lance was
receiving a birthday present of his first-ever bicycle. I am no doubt a sucker
for this kind of thing. Given the hostility Lance Armstrong seems to arouse, there
will probably be people who allege the footage was in some way faked. But I
suddenly found myself feeling overwhelmed.
The emotion came partly from the knowledge of what was to come.
This was the moment Lance Armstrong, author of determined, gritted-teeth time
trials and numerous audacious attacks, became a bike owner. But it was the
thought of his family that choked me up. Lance’s parents had decided he was old
enough to experience the freedom and responsibility of owning a bike. It was time
to pass on the precious, thoroughly grown-up gift of cycling that they had
presumably enjoyed in their own youths.
It is surely one of the unalloyed joys of riding bicycles
that the habit tends to run in families. My father taught me the way to handle
myself on the road, to load luggage and the best way to fix a puncture. He, I
know, learnt many of those things from his own father. I recently had the
pleasure of explaining to my 10-year-old daughter the workings of a derailleur
gear, surely one of the world’s most beautiful marriages of mechanical
simplicity and efficiency.
It’s not, however, only that cycling is something we learn
from our parents and pass on to our children – it’s the time of life at which
we do it. We nurture children in the habit of cycling when they’re past the
point of childish helplessness but before the sourness of adolescence. It’s a
point at which parents are still heroes to their children and children still
distinguished by their potential rather than their shortcomings. I can’t be the
only one who experienced some of his most intimate moments with his father
while cycling with him.
The day of my tenth birthday was not normal. My parents were
being presented to the Queen during a visit to Glasgow and mum and dad decided my sister and
I should take the day off school to see the royal walkabout. The next day my
sister, aunt and I were on the front page of the Daily Record, my sister having
just thrust a bunch of garden flowers into her majesty’s hands. “Happiness is
talking to the queen for these youngsters,” read the caption – ironically,
since even then I think I harboured some republican sympathies.
Yet it was the present waiting at home that made it a
red-letter day for me. It was a sit-up-and-beg Raleigh bicycle, with metal mudguards,
not-very-impressive brakes and Sturmey Archer three-speed gears. For neither
the first nor last time, I failed to cut a dash amid my peers. They were either
contorting themselves to fit the drop handlebars of cheap racing bikes (rrayssurrs,
in Glasgow
parlance) or strutting their stuff on the ubiquitous and absurd Raleigh
Chopper. “Robert’s got a granny bike,” a group of boys taunted me at school
when I described it.
Never mind. My dad forced a wooden mallet underneath the
saddle for a handle and would run behind me, holding me upright, while I learnt
to ride. The skill mastered, I took to pootering around the neighbouring
streets and, every now and again, heading off on longer rides. My dad would
come with me, reaching down to the handlebars of an ancient Dawes tourer.
That bike – a present to my dad on his 15th
birthday 30 years before - had the same, inflexible three-speed Sturmey Archer
gear arrangement as my bike. My dad, I’ve since discovered from an old photo
album, once rode it alongside his father from Edinburgh to Cheltenham. It
wouldn’t look much of a thing now – but, to us, its classic road bike lines
made it possibly the coolest, most authentic bike ever.
I remain wary of being forced too close to the road edge
after catching the kerb on a down hill during one of those rides and somersaulting
head-first into a gravel driveway. My dad, far more anxiously and tenderly
solicitous than normal, bought me an ice lolly from a nearby shop. He wanted, I
think, to get the swelling in my upper lip down before my mum saw me.
I also remember receiving some of my first anti-cyclist
abuse. My dad, sister and I were out on our bikes one Sunday afternoon looking,
to the disdain of a local youth, unbearably middle-class. “The family ones on
bikes,” he sneered, in a la-di-dah voice.
Yet, even though my cycling tailed off for a while once I
outgrew that first bike, something
picked up on those outings told me bikes and I – and my family and bikes - belonged
together.
I took that old Dawes tourer to university when I started and
gradually destroyed it, testing components nearly 40 years old and finding them
wanting. I remember bowling down a footpath in St Andrews and screaming other
students out of the way after the brake blocks had failed and flown off. I
replaced it with, at last, a drop-bar road bike and rode it all over Scotland,
particularly the summer after my grandfather died. Some days I’d take my bike
through to Edinburgh and cycle to his old house to get on with the clearing up.
Other days, I’d head off in the morning and ride 70, 80, 100 miles, heading up
the side of Loch Lomond, across to Fife or down towards the southern uplands,
slogging my way through mile after mile of what seems looking back
extraordinarily uncomplicated, enjoyable cycling.
Szentendre: I cycled a fair bit
of the way there
Another Raleigh road bike, cheap in a sale because of its
nasty pink colour, came along after that first bike was stolen. It was with me
when I married and later when I moved to London. Badly bashed about during my
move to Hungary, it sat unused for several years until I could face foregoing
cycling no more. “Csonkott a vaz,” said the men in the bike shop: “the frame is
broken”. But, doing a very eastern European job of patch and mend, they got me
back cycling. Speaking one Sunday evening shortly afterwards to my father, I intended
to mention I was riding again – but kept forgetting. The pride of my
12-year-old self in my achievements wanted to share with him my excitement at
my accomplishments. I rode to an appointment up in the Buda hills! I followed
the Danube path most of the way to Szentendre!
It was the last time I spoke to him. Later that week, his
already serious illness took a turn for the worse and, much faster than any of
us had anticipated, he died. Had I known we were saying goodbye, I would of
course have told him how, without my realising it, he had become my template
for how to be a man: I was as fixated as he on trying to do what I, in my
stubborn mind, saw as the Right Thing. I was trying to emulate his gentle
kindness towards the vulnerable. But, given that I would never have said such
things in what seemed like a normal, Sunday night telephone call, I still
regret not having mentioned the cycling. It was an activity that, whenever I
discussed it with my father, always seemed, even when we saw life very
differently, to revive the glow of those early rides together.
Why that particular regret nagged at me, however, wouldn’t
be entirely clear until my own children had bikes. Then, this past Christmas,
my daughter, having been given cycling clothes, demanded, at five o’clock on
Christmas Day, to go out for a ride. It was a demand that my dad, with his stubborn
individualism, would have well understood. Some weekends at present, I run
round the pavements behind my four-year-old son, holding him upright as he, as I
did before him, tries to learn to ride. Most weekends, we head off on some
trip, my son in his trailer behind me, my daughter behind that and my wife
bringing up the rear – a procession of a certain kind of British middle-class
eccentricity.
But cycling is a family activity for me at other times too.
My father barely ever cycled in his final decades but I still recall how he set
himself over his bike, pushed down with his right leg and set off. It’s much the
same way, I suspect, I do the same thing. His voice and attitudes echo around
my head. Even on the loneliest country roads and dark south London streets in the
early hours, I never seem to cycle entirely alone.
