Cycling obsessed, in ways good and bad

About 130 ardent young teenagers are now hitting the tracks and streets in a junior version of the Tour of Southland and a cracking spectacle they’ll make.

This is what we like to see – ardent young athletes giving it heaps. Whereas . . .

The sour side of cycling comes careering to the frame from Dunedin in the account of threeyear-old Jaxxyn Scott left brokenlegged by a cyclist at St Kilda’s Marlow Park in circumstances that would whiten the knuckles of parents anywhere. The tyke was standing on an internal footpath when he had a painful encounter from a rider said to be pedalling pretty fast, head-down, who then picked himself off the ground, swore, told him to watch where he was going, reproached his mother, and scarpered without even checking the wee guy’s condition.

Quite rightly, there’s a degree of police interest now in speaking to the rider, and it’s not to ensure that the boy’s bones didn’t scratch his mountainbike.

Any sport or recreation is going to produce unedifying behaviour from time to time but for what it’s worth, here’s hoping young Jaxxyn’s recovery extends to him not developing a traumatised mistrust of cycling.

That mistrust is problematically widespread. Granted, sporty cycling is there to be seen, as mountainbikers disport themselves exultantly and the lycra-clad cyclists in this week’s junior tour get rightly competitive.

But the event organiser, Mark Hotton, voices a legitimate concern about the sport’s future when he says that many parents are becoming afraid of letting their children cycle, from fear that roads have become more dangerous.

Quite so. And with all due respect to the emergence of E-bikes and the halo that rests atop cycling for reasons of health and the ecology, those who don’t encourage their children to cycle are often drawing on their own observations of road safety realities.

Hotton says if more kids ride to school there will be fewer cars on the road from parents, making it safer. Well, sure, traffic safety research from the NZ Transport Agency suggests that the more cyclists we have, the risk profile improves partly due to a ‘‘safety in numbers’’ effect and partly because this will increase demand for cyclefriendly road infrastructure. A study of cyclist-vehicle collisions 2012-16 showed no cyclist fault in 70 per cent of cases, primary fault 19 per cent, and some fault in 11 per cent. In other words, cyclists are more dinged against than dinging.

So we can conclude what? Good, cyclist-welcoming road design is to be encouraged alongside a rather more ardent climate of general vigilance.

The stats point pretty clearly to the areas of personal failure. For cyclists as well as motorists, the most commonplace fault has been failure to give way, chiefly from inattention. The other guy came from nowhere. Or more specifically, nowhere where they were looking all that closely.

So everyone look more closely, whether or not you’re on a busy road. And even then there’s something to be said for being careful with your speed too. Sometimes it might be a three-yearold you need to see.