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Any reputable studies on when the hatred against cyclists started in the UK?
Well, in a nutshell—the first riders were generally well-to-do people, as bikes were quite expensive. This started well before the safety bicycle. As carriageways were generally unmetalled, many velocipedists must have taken to ride along the pavements (correctly 'footways' nowadays, but initially called thus because they were the first part of the streets to be paved), and there was a very early ban on cycling on the footway in London.
Even on a velocipede, people were terrifyingly fast compared to walking, even faster when they were able to ride ordinary bicycles and later safety bicycles, and when jaunts into the countryside became popular with the upper classes, they were felt by many to terrorise the rural population, e.g. children who were used to playing in country lanes.
Mass cycling came along somewhat later, but the pattern of dislike of cycling had been established and was exploited by those who had moved on to motoring, often the same futuristically-minded people for whom previously the bicycle had been the agent of change (as documented very well by Carlton Reid in his book 'Roads Were Not Built for Cars'). Now well-to-do people were 'inconvenienced' by mass cycling and the idea became to (a) frighten people into thinking that walking and cycling were dangerous, as opposed to admitting that the danger came through driving), to (b) construct sidepaths and other means of keeping riders 'off the road', to (c) impose other burdens on them (a big battle was held over the requirement to have rear lights, with cycling advocates arguing that the onus of not crashing into riders from behind should be on drivers), and to (d) legislate in such a way that drivers were rarely held responsible for causing death and injury. There was definitely classism there.
Subsequently, the change documented by Sempé here came about:
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/179185/
Rien n'est simple.
Carlton's book is very good on this, and there's also a good study, in German, by Volker Briese, which contains a good deal of sociological reflection:
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Oliver Schick
Any reputable studies on when the hatred against cyclists started in the UK? Seems like an interesting and impactful thing for a sociologist to pick apart.
My hunch is that it’s an artefact of late 19th / early 20th century classism, when workers increased their presence on the roads through the use of the recently invented bicycle, which must have pissed off the horse/carrriage/car-using upper class to no end. Fast forward to mass manufacture and sale of automobiles by the wealthy to the UK Everyman, and the bicycle must’ve been additionally loathed.
With the exceptions perhaps of Oxford and Cambridge, I reckon hate of cyclists correlates pretty well with Tory voting tendencies on a map.