Coming to a pavement near you... a plague of ignorant cyclists

MANY have been the provocations of these nine weeks long. Sweaty masks and clammy gloves. Untold, involved Sanders of the River expeditions in quest of such scarcities as plain flour, liquid soap and compost.

The weird, wartime lingo – sheltering in place; one form of exercise; such acronyms as PHE, PPE and N95. Not to mention joggers, Beth Rigby, Dominic Cummings’s hideous T-shirts and, on all sides, a legion of armchair epidemiologists who don’t know their Rs from their elbow.

It’s enough to make you overdose with hand sanitiser. But one provocation trumps all, dominates my mailbag and maddens me whenever I venture out: the ubiquitous and swarming cyclists.

They range from the merely smug, through the insolent, the reckless and the seemingly homicidal, swooshing through red lights and cutting corners over pavements as if the Highway Code is only for little people, behinds bobbing like baboons in heat.

In Edinburgh, cycling is not merely the fashion. It seems to be the official religion, as the city has bent over backwards these two decades past to inconvenience, demonise and infuriate the motorist, while plastering cycle lanes and cycle paths everywhere till even a walk with the pooch across The Meadows begins to feel like Blade Runner.

It is all the odder because Amsterdam or Copenhagen Auld Reekie is not. It is a city built everywhere on hills, battered for much of the year with the skreich of easterly winds and, in winter, oft lashed with horizontal rain.

NOT the sort of environment where one would expect the bicycle to prosper – or, if at all, just one or two of John Major’s old maids, pedalling to church on their be-basketed Pashley in shoes so sensible they could put up shelves.

Yet against the climate and despite the ubiquitous braes, cyclists have been multiplying in Edinburgh for as long as anyone can remember and in a sort of perverse Darwinism. Around here, entire families are at it. About three, forty-something overheard-in-Waitrose parents emerge with their 2.2, all as thin as whippets, coasting up Morningside Drive like the Magi on their dromedaries.

Then there are the Lost Boys, without school to attend, who roam the district in small, feral two-wheeled packs. The hardeyed action men in lurid Lycra who hammer everywhere at 35mph, the muesli-muscled dads with one junior perched behind him and still another tiny in a perilous trailer.

It is those of Extinction Rebellion righteousness that madden most, like the young mother who whooshed through Morningside Cross when the green man was on, pensioners and I scattering for cover as she and her progeny blithely broke the law. They had run a red light, I cried. ‘I know,’ she laughed, ‘I don’t know what you’re fussing about…’

On a local nature trail, my mother and I once leapt for our lives as mountain biker thundered at us from the trees: to her reproach, he snapped: ‘I didn’t hit you, did I?’

On the towpath of the Union Canal, I hear of one sprinting cyclist snarling at a lady, ‘Get out of the f ****** way…’ And why do cyclists nowadays never seem to have bells? My father remembers, from his Glasgow student days, the electric trolley-buses of the South Side – particularly feared during smogs and aptly dubbed the ‘Silent Death’.

There is little as terrifying – especially if you are out with the dogs, or if you are elderly or otherwise vulnerable – as a cyclist suddenly overhauling you from behind, at speed and without warning.

Cyclists like to point out that they are 15 times more likely than drivers to be killed on the roads. But, every year, up to six pedestrians – on pavements – are slain by cyclists, to say nothing of those who perish indirectly of bicycle-related injury (30 per cent of pensioners who break a hip will die within the year).

The bicycle used to be the transport of the working man, better-off schoolboys and the university student. Neither of my grandfathers ever had a car; but they both had bicycles. Then, from about the Sixties till well into the Eighties, only children and students seemed to cycle: the transport of the minor and the indigent.

Now – partly because of modern environmental awareness and the obsession with fitness, even well-off adults are pedalling by the tens of thousands. It helps that bicycles today are much lighter and, on various mechanical fronts, hugely improved: the machines of my boyhood might as well have been built with old lead pipe. But cyclists as a species seem to have become much more aggressive, and far ruder.

That’s partly because today, in our modern cities, so many bike for a living. ‘There appear to be soaring numbers of delivery cyclists dropping off takeaways to people in lockdown,’ shudders a colleague.

‘I often see them on pavements and got a particularly rude hand gesture in my direction when I tooted the horn at one who cycled through a red light and onto a pavement.’

AND a reader laments that ‘the worst thing about lockdown is a whole generation of new cyclists now cycling with no lights and no clue’.

One problem may be that cyclists are increasingly distanced from people around them – be-helmeted, begoggled, often be-masked and – the height of irresponsibility – plugged into headphones, all set to storm down some city street at 35mph, cut a corner across the pavement and marmalise your granny to the strains of Judas Priest.

But in 2010/11, the latest year for which I can find statistics, only 72 Scots cyclists were prosecuted for any of a range of offences – from failing to comply with a traffic sign to venturing forth at night without lamps – and only 37 were convicted. Of these, most were let off with a warning.

This scarcely suggests the police, courts or anyone in authority takes cycling offences seriously; or any real awareness that being run down by 200lb of bike and brawn can maim and even kill. A big problem is, of course, that cyclists are so difficult to catch – and bear no number plates.

Nor are cyclists obliged to pass proficiency tests, pay road tax or even shell out for thirdparty insurance – and yet, as we batter on together through ongoing coronababble, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps merrily announces miles more of cycle lanes and a couple of Scotland’s cities proclaim their determination to become more ‘bike-friendly’.

And when Charlie Alliston, 20, was in 2018 jailed for knocking down and killing 44-yearold Kim Briggs on a London street, the best the DPP could nail him for was ‘wanton and furious driving.’

We have no law of ‘causing death by dangerous cycling’ – only that 1861 statute which might as well hail from the days of Ben Hur.

At bottom, though, this is not about law, or policy. As in so much else in this country, it is the sadly ebbing tide of common civility.