The Times Cycling Campaign

The Times letters page has been very disappointing. Yesterday, a brilliant letter from the CTC and then three outrageous letters from ignorant numpties who probably hadn't been on a bike for 50 years preaching unscientific nonsense about cycle safety. Apparently we should be obliged to use mirrors and be decked out "like Christmas trees".

Well, it's better than the Black Republican Bloc's black tents.

In other words, cycling safety is the sole responsibility of the cyclist. The campaign is meant to be dispelling this myth. Why does The Times give them a platform for their ignorant nonsense?

Because you can't just pretend that such opinions don't exist--you have to have them argued out properly. If you try to suppress them, they'll just fester and simmer and it will definitely remain more difficult to change things.

What do you expect if people have been fed nonsensical prejudice for decades and then are told that they're 'ignorant numpties' or 'stupid' or something like that, when at present it is simply part of the accepted, and sometimes dominant, culture of this country--a culture of fear of road danger which has been created quite deliberately during mass motorisation and for which most individuals are not responsible and through which they can't necessarily be expected to see. People like sharing culture and aren't necessarily being stupid in it, and they are also only going to simply clam down if they're called stupid. Why not have the debate? It's not going to hurt anyone, and it might change some people's minds, much as it won't change those of others, but luckily we always have generational change to hope for.

(The issue of 'hatred of cyclists/cycling', by the way, is a different question to when people quite 'naturally' resort to superficial differences as in racism, where they have real difficulties understanding others; it is an artificial agenda created for a purpose, and very established by now. It is bound up with perceptions of social status, comfort, modernism, progress--a heady cocktail which isn't easy to swallow, let alone digest, let alone to live with the consequences of it, let alone to pick apart and communicate solutions to.)