You may have made your mind up about this piece already, seeing as I'm the Ed of a motorcycling website, you'd expect my views to be totally biased towards motorcyclists and against everyone else. We minorities always stick together, right? Wrong.
I love cycling, I respect people who want to get into it for whatever reason; fitness, cutting down your commute time, saving money. Until a stray plastic bag snapped my derailleur off my Scott Speedster, I was cycling into work, around 15 miles a day. I've done the odd triathlon, a few TTs and been falling off push bikes since I was three, so I love two wheels - they're in my blood.
I'm not an angel when I'm cycling, I take risks, we all do but I'm not an RLJ. But what I saw from other cyclists genuinely shocked me. There appears to be an attitude of 'because I'm vulnerable people will look out for me' or, 'because I'm not accountable, I can get away with things other road users can't'. I've seen cyclists shout at other cyclists for running red lights and putting people in danger. And it's good to see other cyclists taking responsilbity.
But recently, since my push-bike has been off the road, I've been riding in on the motorbike again and so I've been taking more notice of cyclists; from where they stop at lights to what they're likely to do in a given situation - seeing as only a week before I was one of them, doing the same.
So the real driver for this piece was my commute in today: I saw one cyclist cut through from the gutter to the outside lane without looking, through bumper to bumper traffic causing a motorcyclist to grab his brakes, locking the front. He only just saved it and credit to him for doing so. The cyclist was blissfully unaware, amazingly ignorant or a deadly combination of both. And he was wearing earphones. He cut across the road, up the pavement and disappeared. If the biker had have t-boned the cyclist, I'm sure broken bones would have been involved for the cyclist, perhaps even death if he smacked his head hard enough - and the biker would have had a nasty insurance claim to deal with.
Then at a T-junction I was turning into, behind a scooter, a cyclist ignored the red and got clipped by the scooter. Result? Bent spokes for the cyclist, scooter was ok. But the cyclist was having a go at the scooter rider. The cyclist deserved a punch in the face - probably the only wake-up call they'd understand. Having a scooter ride into your front wheel and riding into the side of my GTR1400 are two totally different experiences, the cyclist ought to thank the fact that the scooter didn't have much grunt off the line.
And then a few miles down the road at Embankment, I leave the lights, to my left are a group of cyclists wearing bright lyrca on proper road-racing bikes, they're about to catch up with a woman wearing a day-glo vest on a sit-up-and-beg push bike sat about 1 metre from the kerb and in the middle of the road is a guy on a road-racing push bike, right in the middle of the left lane.
I lifesaver to my right to move over but there's no space, not without passing the stray cyclist and brushing his left elbow. So I toot my horn - if he moves over a metre I can get by, but nothing. I check my mirrors, cars queing up behind me. I'm turning left in 100 metres and could squeeze between him and the kerb, but I don't. I sit back. I pull the clutch in and rev the engine, no response. So I do another lifesaver over my right shoulder, there'a gap, not big but big enough. I pass with the cyclist on my left and as I do so, the road-racing group of cyclists at the lights catch up with the guy I'm overtaking and pass him on his left. So he's being overtaken on all sides, the meat in a blissfully unaware sandwich. I look at him as I overtake and he's got his earphones in. What else can you communicate? As I turn left he's still in the middle of the road with a queue of traffic behind him, doing 17mph..
I'm not saying that earphones = no clue. But by wearing them you're as bad as car drivers texting while crawling through traffic - you're simply not paying enough attention and are a danger to others. If you wear earphones, you ought to be compensating for that by looking around you more than usual. The Ed of RoadCyclingUK, Richard Hallett says: "I don't like the idea [of wearing earphones] 'cos being able to hear what's coming up from behind is damn important when you are cycling".
At the root of this is a deep-seated level of incompetence, do cyclists really think they're invincible? Because so many of them ride like they are. Everyone rides with a built-in buffer for error, but more and more my buffer is being used up by dumb-ass cyclists who deserve everything they've got coming to them.
In the broadest world of cycling, I know there are people who take care and want to maintain a decent level of cycling. And whatever cyclists may level at anyone on a motorbike, remember, we've done training and passed a test. No matter how simple that test may be. Cyclists don't have to take a test, maybe they should?
Unless you guys start taking care of yourselves, the government will see fit to take care of you. Don't be afraid to tell another cyclist at the lights what you think of their riding. Nanny state doesn't need much of a scare to wrap you in cotton wool.
