Peter Robins

Wheels within wheels

London cyclists hate each other, too

I have seen only one actual fight in a London cycle lane. It was at St George’s Circus, south of Blackfriars Bridge, on an afternoon late last summer. Two young women were attacking each other over a prone Boris bike, with a third attempting to pull them apart. It seems likely that one had ridden the bike into the other, but I did not interrupt them to check.

One learns quickly not to intervene in bike rage incidents. During my first year as a London cyclist, when I was less good at staying quiet, I was spat at, hit with an egg and, just the once, punched in the face by a man who had run uphill in front of me. Keep your head down and pedal, that’s the best thing.

London, you see, is a city officially in the throes of a bicycle revolution. Successive mayors have told us so, and so have traffic surveys: bike use on main roads here has doubled in the past ten years. Bikes still account for only one in 50 London journeys, but if you look in the right place you can now see cycle-lane traffic jams. (I recommend Bloomsbury on the day of a Tube strike.) And this revolution is accompanied, if not by a Great Terror, then certainly by a Severe Irritation.

Cyclists’ behaviour — shooting red lights, riding on pavements — now ranks among the favourite topics of complaint at police ‘community forums’ in central London. Cyclists, in turn, have come to expect regular displays of hostility. Last year, one prominent bike blog offered several reports of cycle couriers being attacked by a skateboarder in a gorilla mask. If it was a spoof — it would have been a nicely deadpan one, complete with tame witnesses — it fitted the bad temper of the times.

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