Cambridge cyclists need to feel fear again

A motorist-pedestrian alliance against the middle-aged men in lycra

‘Do you want to kill me? Do you want me to die on the road? Huh?’ The man on the bike continued his rant. Walking around the bonnet of a car that was trying to pull out, I had briefly – for all of four or five feet, the width of the car – ventured from a footpath onto a cycle path; the sort which takes up half the pavement, of course. In my new friend’s defence, I had not checked my blind spots before shuffling onto another bit of the pavement, and he had been going so fast that he had to go into the road to avoid hitting me. My suggestion that he perhaps shouldn’t be riding as fast as he could along a path which he knew pedestrians would have to use, and that it might’ve been a bit silly for him to try to overtake me just as the pavement narrowed near the car, seemed not to calm him down. ‘What if I’d been a child?! What if I’d been a school child?!’ ‘Errr?’ And off he went, pedalling as fast as he could, straight into a crowd of children cycling the other way. This was Cambridge in 2023, but unless Britain changes course, this could be every town and city in the country, from Exeter to Inverness.

The disinterested normie who vaguely recalls his Geography GCSE case studies, or whom the YouTube algorithm once subjected to a video about floating bus stops (more on those later), probably has a natural sympathy for the cyclist, that rare species of journey-maker who, in their world, is usually prevented from driving a car to work by some sad accident of life – maybe he’s poor, maybe he’s clumsy, maybe he’s an alcoholic – some tragic but tolerable vulture must be tearing at his liver, otherwise he would simply drive a car, like a normal person. In the cities and towns of England’s regions, the occasional cyclist will bob along at the side of the road, wearing perfectly normal clothes, pulling in to let cars pass and seldom venturing onto the pavement. There is something comforting about his slow pace, his awkward gear changes, his builder’s crack peeking out when he leans too far forwards. He seems perfectly content, he’s no trouble – a transport policy which accommodates him sounds great! Don’t we have that already?

But cycling is a numbers game. A small number of cyclists may somewhat slow down the odd car journey, but ultimately they make the air a bit less dirty, use less parking space, and help keep drivers more aware of other road users; a small number of cyclists probably make things slightly safer for pedestrians, if I had to guess. But what if an oyster was only grit? This is the bold experiment being carried out by Cambridge City Council and its Byzantine counterpart, the Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP).

The GCP was founded in 2014 by the Con-Dem Coalition, giving the region around Cambridge about £500 million to spend (waste) on transport and infrastructure, including housing (it was supposed to ‘accelerate delivery of 33,480 planned homes and enable the delivery of an extra 1000 new homes’). Each council area represented has one seat on the board, as does the University of Cambridge (although it doesn’t have a vote). At first, this sounds quite sensible, giving members of the best university in the country more say in how their city is run, but sadly this country has come a long way since the days of Pitt the Younger. Michael Gove’s recently announced ‘town boards’ will probably be arranged along similar lines, if I had to guess.

Leaving aside other concerns, like what kind of ‘housing’ the GCP is ‘accelerating’ and ‘delivering’ – many new developments backed by the GCP have ‘affordable housing’ quotas, and the number of Deliveroo drivers in the city has ballooned – the GCP is explicitly anti-motorist. ‘Car dependancy [sic] threatens Cambridge’s wellbeing’, says an official report about the city with the most cyclists per head in the country. While its plans for a congestion charge have collapsed thanks to consistent and organised public opposition, the GCP has found other ways to restrict motorists and indulge cyclists, all of which make life harder for pedestrians, and more expensive for taxpayers: £24 million alone was spent on laying a new cycle path along a two-mile stretch of Milton Road, even though there is already a cycle path on the other side, and over £1 million was spent redeveloping a roundabout near Addenbrooke’s Hospital – completely contrary to local opinion – because one cyclist died there in 2021. This isn’t to mention the cost of works and new speed limits on the guided bus ways – on which cyclists aren’t even allowed to cycle – because two cyclists decided to cycle on them and got run over, and all the external costs caused by 18-month long works on one of Cambridge’s busiest roads.

The GCP’s problem is that, outside of the old centre of Cambridge, in the more ‘townie’ areas, the bicycle is not all that popular. As the paving stones and narrow mediaeval streets leave the colleges behind and become the broad, tarmacked avenues of the suburbs, the bicycle’s numbers dwindle. These and the ring of villages around Cambridge are where young families like to live; people who need to drop their children off at school on the way to work, do a big shop, visit the grandparents at Christmas. These people need a Vauxhall Zafira.

The GCP and the council hate these people, and want to make their lives as miserable as possible. Luckily for them, this dovetails nicely with their plans to increase cycling: simply remake Cambridge’s infrastructure in the image of two wheels, and the rest will follow. The outskirts of Cambridge, then, have become a frontline in the war on motorists (the city centre’s one-way system long having been given entirely over to the cyclist). And now the same problems which plague the centre are being spread to the ‘burbs. Cyclists rushing down footpaths as fast as they can. Cyclists desperate to overtake you at the narrowest point possible. Cyclists shouting at you for not wearing a fluorescent vest at night. Cyclists hurtling down the wrong side of a bridge right into you. Cyclists putting their lights on full beam, or even flashing, so you can’t see anything. These are all behaviours caused by the cyclist’s own sense of victimhood, his fear of the motorist meaning that he can abuse pedestrians while still feeling persecuted himself. He won’t stop at any of the new ‘floating bus stops’ — separated from the pavement by a cycle path, insane! — in fact, he won’t give way to pedestrians at all.

While the relationship between pedestrian and driver is simple and well-understood, cyclists are a fly in the ointment, a wayward cog seizing up the mechanism. If a cyclist and a pedestrian collide, upon whom does the assumption of responsibility lie? How can a hit-and-run cyclist be identified? I’m not arguing that we need a register of cyclists, that Halfords should do background checks before selling bikes. The solution is to reduce the number of cyclists. The way to reduce the number of cyclists – to the benefit of both motorists and pedestrians – is to empower motorists.

In a town or city where cyclists are few, they realise that using the highway is a privilege, they try not to be a nuisance, they are attentive to the needs of pedestrians because they genuinely feel vulnerable themselves. In a city or town where cyclists are indulged, and their numbers grow, as drivers are brow-beaten into donning lycra, they form great swarms and no longer actually feel any peril when they’re cycling. They start to cycle faster, their numbers force them to spread out, the pavement proves too attractive for them, and red lights and zebra crossings seem to disappear before their eyes. It changes the simple act of walking to the shops from an exercise in looking right, then left, then right again into an elaborate dance, where the gaps between cars are often full of aggressive, middle-aged men in bright yellow clothing stopping you from crossing. It changes the simple good manners of the pedestrian sidewalk (move out of the way of women and old people, walk in single-file when needs be, et cetera) into something like a game of Temple Run, as an errant cyclist decides to hurtle towards you, or come up behind you, or slip in and out of the congested road as he deems convenient. The Ministry of Transport openly admits that non-fatal traffic collisions are vastly under-reported. How many cyclists are injuring pedestrians every year that go unnoticed? How much will this increase as cyclist numbers grow?

This is a separate issue to that of cars. Having been run over as a teenager, I can attest that you normally have to be pretty stupid to get hit by one. The rules of the road are clear, and pedestrians, who have spent their whole lives learning how to interact with cars, basically won’t get hit if they obey them. There are about 1300 road deaths each year, presumably more than there ought to be given the regime’s policy of lax prison sentences for driving offences, but that still means only four people a day actually die on Britain’s roads – many more lives could be saved with common-sense policies like privatising the NHS. And it would be hard to get this figure much lower without all-but abolishing cars – in the Cambridge area, for instance, most road deaths are on roads with a speed limit of at least 60 mph – indeed, of the forty-three road traffic deaths in the whole of Cambridgeshire (including Peterborough, Ely, et cetera) last year, only ten were in areas with a 30 mph speed limit, and two more in areas with a 40 mph limit, despite the vast majority of car journeys being made in such areas. Traffic deaths in most built-up areas in Britain have probably fallen to Prussian horse-kick levels – Britain already has one of the lowest traffic-related death rates in the world – and further restrictions would make no significant difference; and besides, reckless drivers, who are the real problem, don’t become less deadly because of traffic calming measures. The way to deal with them is, and always has been, a harsher licensing regime, meaning people like Bianca Williams shouldn’t be able to rack up 29 points, and even then only be banned for six months. It is not through surrendering our neighbourhoods to aggressive hordes of cyclists, ‘e-scooter’ riders, and the growing numbers of delivery drivers monopolising the pavements with their bulky ‘e-bikes’ – especially now that Sunak has watered down his restrictions on Finger Painting MAs from the University of the West of England.

Of course, if a cyclist does die on the road, one can expect the British state to come out in full force to find anyone else to blame for it. Back in March, a 49-year-old woman with cerebral palsy was found guilty of manslaughter and imprisoned for three years because she swore at a cyclist coming towards her on the pavement, who promptly decided to swerve onto the road and get hit by a car. The police, who seemed to put every effort into convicting the pedestrian, told the court they couldn’t ‘categorically’ say that the pavement wasn’t also a cycle path, whatever ‘categorically’ means here. Yes, the Highway Code may say ‘You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement’ (emphasis in the original), but if the local police feel like it, they can just say they’re not sure if it is a pavement after all – I wonder how often this courtesy is extended to a motorist? The law, then, has emerged as a force which explicitly favours cyclists not just over motorists, but over pedestrians as well. If you are rude to a cyclist for breaking the Highway Code, and this makes them decide to suddenly swerve out in front of a car, you can go to prison. A gentle stroll to the pub now puts you in danger of incarceration.

The emboldening of these groups at the expense of hazardous (if not all that dangerous) urban motorists probably won’t reduce traffic deaths very much. But this troika of two-wheels – the bicycle, the ‘e-scooter’, and the ‘e-bike’ – has already filled the vacuum left by cars, using their limited sense of liability towards pedestrians to become the new apex predators of the city. Wherever cars diminish, cyclists and their allies swell in number and feel free to dominate, so now in Cambridge, every park, every footpath, every pavement is contested. The pedestrian has had his realm of control snatched away from him by the do-gooder local authorities. Walking around the ‘pedestrianised’ parts of the city is now an activity requiring the utmost concentration, while the leafy, car-dominated outskirts can still be a genuine pleasure to stroll through.

Sadly, even ‘righteous cyclists’ make our lives worse, not only by encouraging other people to cycle and giving cover to the bad ones, but also by discouraging car use. This becomes a vicious cycle, as more cyclists and more cycling infrastructure means less cars, and so on and so forth. Cars are essentially a ‘keystone species’ in the urban environment, keeping cyclists in check, like the foxes that hunt rabbits, or the sharks that hunt turtles. Without them, cyclists and their two-wheeled allies will be free to run amok in every town and city in the country, and going for a walk will become needlessly fraught. This is why pedestrians should oppose cycling infrastructure and, more importantly, pedestrianisation, wherever and whenever they can.

Together, pedestrians and motorists, we can defeat the cycling menace. Otherwise, Cambridge today will be the world tomorrow.