The Times Cycling Campaign

Listen, dimwits: blaming cyclists doesn’t help
Hugo Rifkind
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Today's times 10 2012 12:01AM

The idea is to stop people being killed or injured. We’re talking about compassion here
]What is it with people who prefer cars to bikes, and why are they so angry? Don’t worry, this isn’t a column about Jeremy Clarkson. I understand why he’s angry. It’s because he’s not allowed to joke about having people taken out and shot any more, even when he does genuinely think this is what should happen to them and thus isn’t joking at all, and also because he’s reached the age of 51 without anybody telling him about bootcut jeans. But what about everybody else?
What about, for example, Sir Simon Jenkins? A former editor of this newspaper, and one of the best columnists in the business, he’s someone you only cautiously call wrong about things. He wrote a column about this newspaper’s cycling campaign the other day, though, and it was as if he was referring to a different one altogether. The Times thinks “that cycling in London is dangerous and getting more so”, he began, which was at least half-right. “And that the fault”, he continued, “lies with vehicle drivers.”
We said that? Really? Are you sure? I don’t think so. But Sir Simon was not alone in his interpretation. Support for The Times’s campaign has been overwhelming but not universal. Plenty of comments left by drivers have had the petulant, aggrieved tone of people being told off for something that they don’t think is their fault. Which would have been fair enough if they had been. But they hadn’t. Guys, chill. It’s not about you. There was even a piece in the paper last week about an HGV driver who killed a cyclist through no fault of his own, and didn’t believe he’d ever get over it. Harrowing stuff. So where are you seeing this blame, exactly?
There’s a strange, repressed fury here. “They jump red lights and don’t obey the Highway Code!” some people seem incapable of not shouting, whenever the subject of cyclist safety is raised. Oh fine, so we’ll just mow them down with trucks then, shall we? That seems a fair punishment. Isn’t that what you mean? Then what do you mean? Look, it’s not that I don’t think cyclists sin on the road. It’s just that I don’t see why it’s relevant. Personally I’m in favour of people not dying horribly on the road even if I’m not that fond of them. Woolly liberal that I am.
As I never tire of telling people, you can loathe the whole concept of bicycles, you can think all cyclists are stupid, selfish, Day-Glo bastards who shouldn’t be allowed on the road, and you still ought to be in favour of investment in cycle lanes. In fact, you ought to be more in favour than anybody else. You want them off the road? Well you’ll need somewhere else to put them, then, won’t you, dimwit? Then you can drive while texting and open your doors madly into traffic to your flinty heart’s content. Show me a motorist who is against dedicated cycling lanes and I’ll show you somebody so consumed by hate that their brain has stopped working.
But why? Why? I know some cyclists can be annoying in their own very special way. You could see that with the ludicrous response to Matthew Parris’s joke a few years ago that they should be decapitated with piano wire, as though inner-city yobs were going to find evil inspiration in the downpage musings of the op-ed page. I once wrote a column about cycling and other cyclists sent me actual hate mail after I admitted not cycling much in winter. Maybe it’s the constant fear, maybe it’s the erectile dysfunction; there’s a hardcore here who are no fun at all. They’re a tiny minority, though. They cannot be entirely responsible for the hate. Not all of it.
In general, cyclist behaviour simply isn’t that bad. In a way, it’s fascinating that so many feel the need to pretend it is. The cyclist qua cyclist, as a philosopher would say, represents something. In some minds they occupy a niche similar to vegetarians, or Liberal Democrats. Like people who don’t wear shoes, or have made-up food allergies, or are in Coldplay. You know the sort. It’s not what they do. It’s what they are.
Of course, most cyclists aren’t “cyclists”, just as most drivers aren’t Jeremy Clarkson. I’m as fond of abusive pigeon-holing as the next big-haired posho who has never had a proper job, but it shouldn’t get in the way of reason or compassion.
I don’t know Mary Bowers well. She’s the reporter who was knocked from her bike last year; you might have seen her on the front of the paper last week. We last spoke at Glastonbury, when she and her friend Kaya Burgess told me they didn’t want to come with me to see Suzanne Vega and went off to see Beyoncé instead. So I’m obviously aware she was capable of making mistakes. But when I read comments that responded to Kaya’s beautiful article about her accident by questioning whether she’d put herself in danger, I was even more stunned than I was furious.
What does it matter? What sort of person gives a damn? Why does somebody have to be to blame? I’ve had two cycling accidents in my eight years on London’s roads. Once I slammed stupidly into the back of a stationary taxi, once a taxi slammed stupidly into the back of a stationary me. Personally, I don’t feel I deserved three months in a coma for either. Nobody does. Sign up.