Ten Commandments for the London Cyclist
1 Once a human steps into a car they cease to be human. Their strength is magnified beyond their effective control. They become heavy, polluting and dangerous. They are the enemy of the cyclist. A battle line is drawn between the car driver and the cyclist. The cyclist is responsible not just for his own survival but for the effective representation of all fellow cyclists. To this end the car driver must be antagonized and challenged constantly.
2 Traffic lights are designed for large heavy vehicles that have catastrophic effects when they collide with a human. They are not relevant for human-scale transportation devices. When a cyclist reaches a red light and all the cars are sat still belching fumes. She is duty bound to cross the red light. This is one way of making it clear to a driver how inappropriate their vehicle is for a dense urban setting.
3 When a driver passes too close to the cyclist the cyclist should follow the car until the next light and shout in the window at the driver. Appropriate comments include "get out your car and get some exercise… you are rotting in there and those fumes are killing the rest of us". Should the driver be of the aggressive, anti-cyclist variety things can heat up quickly. Be ready to make a quick exit.
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4 Pedestrians are like cyclists but without a bike. They should be viewed with sympathy and always given room for safe passage. However, on pelican crossings they do not need the entire strip for their safety. As discussed in 2 the bike is light and nimble. A cyclist can circumnavigate a pedestrian without total stoppage. If they have problems explain how traffic architecture is designed for the car not the bike.
5 Slip streaming increases the efficiency of cycling in London. If cyclists in the front do not like it they can signal and shift left allowing others to take the lead. Cyclists should help each other at all available opportunities. Competition between cyclists is natural and healthy. However, never forget, it is the car driver who is your enemy.
6 Death is a real prospect for all London cyclists. Around 20 are killed every year by cars. It is useful to meditate upon death for at least 5% of all cycle journeys. Imagine being hit by a car and falling into an on coming bus. Imagine your relatives weeping. Then take care and assert yourself boldly to the car.
7 Car drivers get angry when they cannot pass you. They will normally rev their engines releasing excess fumes. When they can pass they will do so at unnecessary speed. Usually they will break soon after as they approach the next light/bumper of the front car. As you pass them shake your head and tap your head. These people are dinosaurs.
8 Sometimes the only safe way to continue your journey is to mount a pavement. Some pedestrians feel threatened by this. It is important they understand that pedestrians and cyclists are extremely closely related. They are of the same scale and both can move slowly and carefully. They need to understand that it is the car that: congests cities taking space away from other crucial needs of citizens; causes increases in asthma, lung cancer, brain damage and other illnesses caused by pollution; hit and wound 2 teenagers per week; contributes to soaring obesity and heart disease by promoting inactivity; prevents school children walking to school because of car-danger; leads to the delocalization of our basic needs leading to the death of local shops and the genesis of out of town shopping hell zones and also… contributes to global warming. Never accept that a bicycle is a threat when there are cars in the vicinity. By removing cars from London, cyclists and pedestrians could easily co-exist in peace.
9 The government pays billions of pounds every year to subsidize the car. They do this through road building, traffic management devices, police fees etc. the police are employed by the government to maintain a dangerous, potentially catastrophic system. Reasoning with policemen is not known to ever have worked. They should be treated with extreme caution.
10 Cycling is joy available to nearly all of us. It is amongst the most ingenious of all humanities inventions. Love your bike. Love your fellow human. Love this precious earth that we were inexplicably born onto.
The Admiral Melson
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59 comments
Drivers complaining about cyclists bending a rule or two are like the serial killer who complained to the EU Human Rights Commission that the prison warder hat his thumb in the soup when serving supper.
Technically he has a small point but still it rings utterly wrong.
For the first time in 7 years and since buying my new bike I cycled home during the rush hour. From St Pauls to Finsbury Park. The majority of the cyclists I saw should have had their bikes taken away from them. They were rushing, scared and
scary. Getting in the way of other road users not signaling or obeying traffic signals and never looking around them before moving off. And what is it with that bunching thing at the traffic lights ? That is the most sheep like behaviour I have every seen second only to horn beeping and about as useful. And you know what happens to sheep?
I cycle the way I was taught, namely with the ebb and flow of the traffic not against it. The only time I have every come close to an accident is when I got cocky and broke this rule.
One more thing not mentioned much in the replies but spoken of in the article. Rogue cyclists were characterized as ".....privileged, white, self-absorbed and arrogant...."
Well the ones I saw were all white, self absorbed and arrogant in their behaviour and their bikes and kit looked pricey, lots of Bromptons and £500 plus racers and MTB's and helmets at £100 a pop.
Bloody Guardian readers!
Ignorant. Smug. Complacent. Pointless. Irrelevant.
Wrong....tedious....whiney....nonsense
Notorious shock-jock Jon Grunt used to routinely refer to London cyclists as 'lycra-clad cyclo-fascists' - before he was run out of town, that is, then run out of his home town, Coventry, then when he was confronted by the problems his famous children ("give em a hug and a kiss and tell em you love em EVERY day") faced on their bikes, was forced to publicly recant, and admit that he himself had run red lights out of sheer self-preservation.
So should all cheap, mindless hacks suffer the same retribution and public humiliation.
A completely bias opinion of someone who obviously has not looked at the debate from both perspectives, something which I believe they begin to teach at English GCSE level... maybe the Time Out editors should have looked at cycling schemes in other major european cities such as Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid, or compared the amount of bike lanes the UK has to other developed countries. Michael, it seems like your simply rousing the support and anger of the pedestrian majority by feeding them one sided shite... never in my life did I think i'd see someone start talking about fascism in the same article as cyclists. Maybe you should go and write for the Daily Sport. Time Out continues it's mission to reduce itself to the category of 'toilet paper.'
A few mopnths ago, Westminster council annopunced that it would be testing a continental scheme which effectively abolished box junctions and forced all road users to co-operate in their own survival. This meant that pedestrians, motorists and cyclists would all shar the same road space.
While it sounds mad, where it has been tested, it apparently slashes the accident rate AND increases traffic flow.
Does anyone know what happenned to this scheme?
Hello all. Michael Hodges, sir, your article is entertaining as a diatribe, but dubious as weighted opinion. I am a cyclist, and obey red lights at all times, and do not get onto the pavement as a general rule, unless, for example, my cycle path (my official cycle path), is part of the pavement or leads me into a park. I agree that cyclists flagrant disregard for the Highway Code (and it is written in the Highway Code what laws apply to cycling, including NOT riding on pavements), red lights, and the safety of pedestrians is unacceptable, and hope to see a crackdown on such behaviour as it gives all London cyclists a bad name. Cycling is excellent exercise, good for the environment, and is probably one of the fastest ways to move around our congested, poorly laid out city. As a cyclist, I have to be on constant guard for taxis, white vans, busses, and, more than anything else, pedestrians who flout THEIR red lights,far more often than I. Cycling is an important part of London's commuting geography, and these issues your articles raise deserve to be addressed-but to ascribe the arrogant, over-testorised behaviour of a few as broad fascism is just, well, it's just silly.
And now we have The Fragrant Matthew Parris
The unpaid 'Lyrical Terrorist ' urges the decapitation of the infidel - justifiable outrage and a court conviction..
Overpaid, toffee nosed moron in Kensington High st calls for the decapitation of cyclists - it's just a joke!
But not any more, according to the IPPC, who forced Parris into a grovelling 'apology'. With that precedent set, the rest of the tabloid motormouths can look forward to the same treatment. The Clarksons and Gaunts and Littlejohns in the gutters of publishing will have to smarten up their act.
And about time too.
But let's look at that 'apology' again.
In fact, Parris merely tried to blame the outraged for not seeing the joke.
"I offended many with my Christmas attack on cyclists. It was meant humorously but so many cyclists have taken it seriously that I plainly misjudged. I am sorry..."
Which simply doesn't make sense. The reaction can't have caused him to 'misjudge' as it didn't happen until after he had judged. He is not apologising, just despicably trying to get off the hook.
And this confusion of basic Cause and Effect from a man so ostentatiously full of the joys of rigorous, analytical, classical education and such a valiant defender of all forms of elitism. Here is a Mighty Mind Oe'rthrown indeed.
In the meantime the likes of Parris and the other tabloid brats can go on promoting speeding and jumping lights and using mobile phones as positive signs of virility and status on megaphones of Lad Culture such as Top Gear.
But it seems the game is up. Any columnist seeking an easy target will now have this ruling hanging over him, and a large number of people watching their every move.
Expect a class action of some kind if editors don't come to their senses and make their columnists grow up, or at least wean them off their dependency on casual incitement to murder, because whatever the comic pretensions of hacks like Parris, Clarkson and Littlejohn, someone will do as they are told, and there will be no way of proving it. All it takes is a little delay on the brake pedal and another cyclist is dead. And that delay can be caused by the hatred spread by the media. In effect, it is the most efficient form of incitement there is. At least with other forms, the means of execution are explicitly criminal and rarely able to be disguised as an accident. This is not the case when the murder weapon is a car. And is much too easy when the target is suitably demonised by the media - when people on bikes have been dehumanised to a problem on wheels.
In the critical second or two before a collision with a cyclist, anyone agreeing wholeheartedly with Parris, which he presumably hopes is as many readers as possible, would not first see a human being in danger but just another obnoxious bloody cyclist - and only finally, when it is too late, see the human being. It is not a conscious decision, just an unnecessary, synthetic emotion getting in the way of the normal human response.
This is something which happens all the time - especially to drivers, subject as their personalities are to the distortions of being in control of superhuman power. We call it Road Rage, and it is entirely understandable in a culture which worships power for its own sake, and especially in one in which every individual is seen as competition, as getting in the way, and effectively shortening the commuter's life by delaying the time he can spend away from his work, doing wht he 'likes'. The politics of the cult of the superman are not that different from the politics of Lad culture after all, it seems.
The parallel with fascism is apt, but unfortunately it is Mr. Hodges who is, metaphorically speaking, the one 'wearing the jackboots'.
The Transport Research Laboratory studied the attitudes of other road users to cyclists (TRL report 549 'Drivers' perceptions of cyclists) and came to the conclusion that cyclist are treated as an 'out group' and as such the target of the sort of irrational prejudice all minority groups who are perceived as posing a challenge to the social 'norm' suffer from. This article is just another example of such prejudice, although unlike the likes of Matthew Parris and Emma Parker-Bowles the writer does not seem to be prepared to 'extend the logic' of his world view to the extend of arguing for a terminal 'final solution' to the supposed 'cyclist problem'.
Will Storr, writing in The Observer of 4 June 2006, neatly summarised the TRL's report as follows:
"A recent report for the government commissioned by the Transport Research Foundation found that drivers treat cyclists as an 'out-group'. According to social-identity theory, this means that there is a multi-forked bias against us, which takes the form of that pernicious trident of hate - discrimination, stereotyping and prejudice.
So, in the head of a typical driver, subconsciously and automatically, things like these happen: the behaviour of the worst cyclist is used to judge them all; any cash the council visibly spends on them seems maddeningly unfair; any accident is the cyclist's fault; when making a decision, the motorist puts the needs of other motorists first; any behaviour at all that is 'different' to the driver's own is wrong. And so on. These are precisely the same primeval mental sparks that lead to football hooliganism, gang warfare and racism. Provocative and hateful newspaper reports about 'two-wheeled terrorists' merely stir up tribalism - basic, brutal and bad. It's the most dangerous and atrocious human impulse there is."
i couldn't agree more here. Theres nothing more frustrating than stopping at traffic lights going amber then a vicious cyclist darts by, almost clipping your car. This issue has to be resolved, some cyclist's (not all) need to start obeying the basic rules of the road, before yet another person else gets seriously injured
Hodges,
as a cyclist from Berlin (double Nazi!) who visits London on regular terms I should actually have opted to ignore or smile away your crass and offensive provocation.
But then it struck me: stern insistence on laws with no tolerance whatsoever, hateful disrespect for complete population groups and a generally humourless attitude - damn it, Hodges, you're the fascist. And a twat.
and that wasn't sarcastic, i genuinely think that people who are criticising cyclists should have a go and see thinsg from the other side. i HAVE got the bus to work and i HAVE gone to work by car.
Tim Hubbard, it is really really frustrating when cars give you little/no room and then people are in the gutter wiating to cross over/on our cycle path (of which there are very few!!) I don't think it is good taht the person started shouting at you, but i always stop and tell people that it is dangerous to walk in the cycle lane (and yes some of them are on the pavement.. it is split up for both you and I) or put their feet on the road. The reason we don't get the bus is we are trying to travel cheaply, quickly and be envin. friendly!! As I said before, why on earth aren't people proud of our cycling community?? The VAST majority are nice, friendly people who are just going to work. It beats me why someone would get so angry about us. Why not try cycling tomorrow?? I had the most beautiful, relaxing cycle in this morning from Ealing to Uxbridge and there was no rage. Could you cycle to work too or are you too far out?
I almost got mowed down by an idiot cyclist coming up from behind me today. Scared the hell out of me! He screamed all sorts of insults at me. Next time this happens I'll make sure I'll buckle the cyclists wheels by booting him/her off their bike! They should also stay in the ruddy road as well and not on the pavement. If they say it's too dangerous on the road, take the flippin' bus!! Pavements are for pedestrians, not bikes...