Blame cyclists for stoking the flames of the road culture war
Our land was once riven by Roundheads and Cavaliers; four centuries later, battlelines are drawn between cyclists wielding Gopro video cameras and other road users. The odd truth of this came home to me this week when 77-year-old Wayne Humphreys notched up a fine and costs totalling £4,500 after a magistrate deemed he’d left insufficient room when overtaking a cyclist near Bridgend (Humphreys had only accrued one other offence in 60 years of driving, for doing 34 mph in a 30 zone). I examined the video footage and my own expert judgment was: “Lucky devil – that’s three times the space bus drivers give you in Cambridge.”
I spend half my life on two wheels, so I’m mustard-keen on motorists giving bikes safe passage. Equally, I loathe the self-important, bulging-calved, Lycra-clad, road-hogging behaviour of Serious Cyclists on their 10-grand racers – mowing down pedestrians and yelling obscenities at Nissan Micras.
My animosity was honed in Richmond Park: a favourite London haunt, until it was ruined by packs of Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) bearing down on you like Tolkien’s Nazgul. Stars will die and civilisations fall before these sinewy terminators will slow to let a family cross the road. They don’t gaze upon the deer or trees, but pedal in circles like android hamsters. Cars can’t exceed 20 mph in Richmond Park, but the new puritans flash by with homicidal velocity. Even so, I don’t whip out my iphone to record their trespasses against humanity. Because if there’s one thing worse than calling your mate Pete to announce, “I’ve just beaten my personal best”, it’s a determination to get other road users into trouble.
In fact, it’s my observation that sharing incriminating Gopro footage has become the province of people who once campaigned to be school prefects just so they could report fellow pupils to teachers. The type of person who enjoyed lockdown, because they could dob in their neighbour for going out twice in one day. You never see them admitting, “Yes, I’ve made a few mistakes in my time.”
They don’t confess to cycling the wrong way up a one-way street and making a stressed-out mum perform an emergency stop. In Cambridge, cyclists mount pavements, jump lights, whizz the wrong way up “pedestrianised” Trinity Street and let fellow students ride pillion. It’s like Gotham City at its most lawless, but I still don’t pull out my iphone to get a second-year physics student sent down.
Nor do the Gopro cycling vigilantes concede their own motoring mishaps in a Volvo estate: that time they missed the turning to their friend’s Huf Haus in Norfolk and stopped so suddenly the postie rear-ended them. My friend Hugh can’t have been the only person to have flung open a black cab’s side-door to find he’d tipped a hipster off his penny-farthing – one bystander cheered.
The self-appointed sheriffs of Britain’s highways and cycle lanes, with their Twitter feeds full of Gopro footage, are somewhat entertaining. But the “two wheels good, four wheels bad” vibe makes me want to station these cameras by Vauxhall’s frantic cycle paths to see how much grace cyclists give pedestrians.
However, the Cavaliers won the last war (eventually) and I expect they’ll triumph in this one. I advise mayoral candidates to ban Gopros and campaign on a “Go Slow” platform.