“In the six days since a law to prosecute dangerous cyclists was announced, somewhere close to 30 people will have been killed on UK roads, none of them struck by bikes. About 500 more will have suffered serious, potentially life-changing injuries, with pretty much all connected to motor vehicles. Again, going on the statistical averages, over those same six days, slightly more than 1,600 people across the UK will have died due to illnesses associated with physical inactivity. Riding a bike cuts your likelihood of developing such conditions by about half.” Peter Walker, Bike blog, The Guardian, 21 May 2024
Indeed, the UK Government is creating a new offence of “causing death or serious injury by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling”! Where dangerous remains to be properly defined and assessed. (As most cyclists have no speedometer, and the remaining ones may prove more dangerous checking their speed on their Garmin watch! As I am when going downhill to Porte de Versailles around 40km/h…, if not 52mph as hilariously denounced by the predictably cyclophobic Daily Mail!) Another illustration of overreaction, cheap fear-mongering, and electoralist populism based on a single horrific deadly accident, and mostly missing the elephant in the room, that is, the lack of proper uninterrupted bike lanes and other infrastructures that should not be shared with pedestrians, cars, or buses. And the intentionally hidden disproportion between car-caused and cycle-caused deaths. (Of course, I am totally biased towards cycling, while some will consider my running managing red lights wanton and furious! But I stand by the fact that cycling usually gets the worst of car and pedestrian regulations.)
As an aside, the pun in the title first came to me as a joke told by Tony O’Hagan, presumably told at a Valencia meeting decades ago. Apparently it is popular enough to be adopted by cycling enthusiasts.
Xi'an's Og 