This morning's commute and other commuting stories

For example, many cyclists think it is OK for them to ride on footpaths crowded with pedestrians, of through a pedestrian crossing - something you see every day in the city.

That's not a very good comparison to behaviour in the Foot Tunnel, though, as for the most part footway riders ride on the footways for very different reasons.

For this reason, for better or worse, we need rules and these rules need to be enforced. At the moment, the rules in the Foot Tunnel (Foot Tunnel, the clue is in the name), prohibit cycling, and should therefore be observed.

I agree, for as long as they're in place, they should be followed (and enforced, but that won't happen, especially with local authority funding cuts). I also completely agree with your description below:

What I see every morning is not a group of rational, socially motivated cyclists riding carefully through a shared-use space; rather I see a group of vacuous; self-important individualist determined to get through their journey in the least possible time without any regard to the needs of others.

I've seen this, too, although I use the tunnel only rarely and usually not at peak times. However, as you say yourself, the rule is not being followed. It is part of the quality of a rule whether it works, and that includes whether it's observed. If it's not observed, it brings the law into disrepute, making it appear toothless and easy to run rings around, so sometimes it's better not to have laws but instead to venture into relying on people.

It's the old problem of the social contract on a small scale--'well, here's this rule with which I don't agree, what's that you say? it's based on this social contract that was passed hundreds of years ago by people alive then, so they've more recently followed all the agreed procedure for introducing the cycling ban, well, I wasn't around then and I wasn't consulted, so there'.

The problem is that bans are proposed to take it out of people's hands to decide how to act, so the only decision left to people is whether to observe or not to observe the ban. People do want to make their own decisions, though, and they will, unless enforcement is watertight.

By contrast, if people come into a social situation (which is what traffic, including shared use, basically is) where there's an established way of doing things that clearly works (and you need behaviour codes to be fairly well-established and not to have the rules changed backwards and forwards all the time, for them to have staying power), you're going to get far fewer people transgressing. You can never remove that entirely, but you can persuade more people to sign up to the 'social contract' there by not making it formal and allowing it to be confirmed or renewed with every new encounter. You're still going to get conflict between people, but generally far less than in the current situation, and where it occurs the issue to discuss won't be about 'ban or no ban' but 'what you did just there was wrong', much more specific and localised.

Riders won't think 'I'll just have to get through this tunnel quickly to avoid being caught' and walkers won't feel as if riders are transgressive. (The problem of the 'scofflaw' perception of cycling is one of the fundamental problems inherent in promoting it; relatively few people want to join a faction that's seen as unlawful.) Those who ride very fast will be exposed much more, as they won't have very many others to hide among, and most of them will adapt their riding style. (There's also a long history of cycling in the tunnel, which I've been observing for over ten years; there have been some interesting twists along the way.)

(NB none of this is meant to sound like a Thatcherite argument, who I would argue actually decreased people's freedoms and individualism in many ways, although I agree that fast foot tunnel cycling looks like a symptom of her kind of thinking. I'm actually heavily in favour of individualism, but the kind for which you need to be in close and collaborative contact with others, or how is anyone going to notice your individualism? If it's only you it's not individualism but solipsism. The sort of misunderstanding of 'individualism' associated with Thatcher is actually just a complex of social anxieties (e.g., 'I'm better than others so I have to keep a class apart') that doesn't have much to do with the real meaning of the concept.)