Essex appeal
How a traffic-free sportive masks the dangers on Essex’s roads
By the time you read this, the first RideLondon-Essex 100 event will have seen thousands cycling on Essex’s gloriously and temporarily traffic-free roads. The event has a place in my heart: the years I rode the LondonSurrey 100 were truly joyful, with people yelling support, clapping, high-fiving and generally being brilliant, including occasionally offering aid to passing riders. That’s not to mention the camaraderie of fellow cyclists riding on quiet roads. Nine years since its inauguration, the event moves to Essex, its great legacy putting three of its features – Box Hill, Leith Hill and Newlands Corner – among Britain’s most popular Strava segments, and filling Surrey lanes with riders at weekends.
As someone who lives four short miles from the Essex border in East London, I would love the same here, but can’t help wonder what the legacy of RideLondon-Essex will actually be. In many ways Essex is perfect for cycling. Much – but not all – of it is flat, appealing to newer riders, and it boasts Epping Forest, rich wildlife, gorgeous countryside and historic villages among its jewels. However, the thought of potentially thousands of new riders tempted onto Essex roads of a weekend concerns me. No event exists in isolation, and RideLondon is a 2012 Olympic road-race legacy, following the cycling greats who rode those same miles of tarmac. Events like this, in turn, encourage riders to explore the area outside of the event – and rightly so. The one snag is, Essex isn’t Surrey or, more specifically, Essex drivers aren’t Surrey drivers. Those who cycle in Essex, and I used to count myself among them before one too many scary incidents frightened me off, have stories to tell.
Essex has the second highest road-casualty rates in the UK (3,777 a year), partly due to high traffic volumes. That’s not to let Surrey off the hook, in fourth-worst place (3,445). Anecdotally, Essex drivers can feel actively aggressive to cyclists and, before getting an off-road bike, I was close-passed, shouted at and intimidated – some of which was likely lack of awareness rather than active aggression. When the Essex event was announced I approached police, council, event organisers and anyone who might have responsibility for road safety in Essex. One by one they told me there were no road-safety plans for RideLondon; the event is on closed roads, and that’s the end of it. In February, after a cyclist was killed in a collision with a driver on Essex roads, Essex’s head of roads policing told me while they weren’t planning eventspecific action, they were focusing their fairly limited resources (seven police across 5,000 miles of roads ‘on a good day’) on data-led enforcement of speeding, homing in on the roads cyclists use most, and a special weekend court to process law-breaking drivers caught by citizens’ helmet and dash cameras. While good, it falls short of the kind of concerted education blitz a sudden rise in cyclists would require. I appeared on BBC Radio Essex recently, before a local cycling club representative who echoed my concerns, adding Essex drivers sometimes clipped the elbows of riders while overtaking, and two members had sold up and moved to Suffolk, fearing for their lives.
The Essex constabulary is in a difficult situation: cuts that disproportionately affected roads policing decimated their ability to enforce the law and educate drivers, and driving standards worsened. But what we saw from the Highway Code changes was the importance of getting ahead of attitudes and assumptions before changes happen – explaining why leaving a generous space when overtaking a fragile cyclist in a motor vehicle is so important, why people cycle two abreast (and it’s not simply to annoy drivers) and giving cyclists the legitimacy of police support and the back-up of enforcement.
In 2016 West Midlands police got ahead of Birmingham’s cycle network expansion with a programme of data-led cycle safety campaigns, pioneering now widely-used close pass operations in which cyclemounted police are used to stop, educate and enforce driving standards around cyclists. Within a year, serious cycling collisions were down by a fifth. People everywhere deserve the option to cycle on roads without fear for their safety, but until there’s proper education and enforcement of driving standards, and decent roads-police funding, road safety will remain a postcode lottery.