Do You Wanna Be In Our Gang?

This column was written as a counterpart to Sanny’s column about red light jumping, which you can read here.

By Antony De Heveningham

Do you, dear reader, think of yourself as a cyclist? Not just a regular bloke or bird who cycles, but someone for whom the act of cycling is such a fundamental part of your life that it ranks alongside nationality, marital status and choice of operating system?

Perhaps you proudly introduce yourself as a cyclist at social gatherings, hoping that you’ll be invited to join a stimulating debate about wheel sizes, or the relative merits of disc brakes on road bikes. Or perhaps you tread a bit more carefully, lest you receive a hot earful of invective about the Two-Wheeled Taliban, the Cycling Camorra, the Lycra Lycanthropes, or whatever derogatory epithet the Daily Mail Minorities Adjective Combinator has spewed out this week.

There’s no denying that cycling has an image problem, and one of the first things you learn, (right after how to unclip from your SPDs) is that it’s our own fault. Yes, me and you. Recklessing around on our little 0.5 horsepower death chariots, treating red lights like windows of opportunity; If only we weren’t so bally selfish the entire time we’d be respected. Of course, you don’t do those things yourself. But instead, I’m afraid, you are guilty by association. You are a cyclist, who lives in a big house with all the other cyclists, and that house is not in order.

There’s no denying that cycling has an image problem

I don’t know where the walls of this house start and end precisely. There are many people out there who maintain that the individuals who break the rules and bring shame on us all aren’t “cyclists”, they’re just “people on bikes”. But that’s fooling no-one. Irresponsible people on bikes seem to be quite capable of disguising themselves as responsible cyclists, affecting lycra, machines that cost more than an impulse buy at a supermarket, and much more.

Maybe the distinction lies elsewhere. Are users of belt drives or other novel transmission systems less likely to be forced into shouldering their share of the collective guilt? Do penny farthing riders get given more slack? I’m fairly sure they do. And as for unicyclists? Well, we all know how untouched by mortal concerns they are.

But for everyone else, who rides a vaguely conventional bike in a vaguely conventional fashion, we’re on a sticky wicket. Yes, we can tidy our bit of the house, but there’s not much point when the first thing people see is the mess those brakeless fixie riders have left in the hall. The only solution is to apologise, again and again, and then solemnly try and deal with the upstarts in our ranks, via the time-honoured British disciplinary system of tutting.

This system would be fantastic if it worked… but it doesn’t.

Occasionally we might actually toss the dishcloth and take someone to task in person, but for the most part, we address these issues in 21st century fashion, by muttering some words under our breath, furiously typing those words into a small box, then hitting send.

This system would be fantastic if it worked… but it doesn’t. We’ve had 130 years of the modern safety bicycle, and 129 years of wringing our hands about the behaviour of the numpties who ride them. Actually, make that 173. Back in 1842, the father of the pedal-driven bicycle, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, was one such numpty, knocking over a small child while riding “a velocipede of ingenious design” and receiving a fine of 5 shillings. Instead of Enduro, we had Scorchers; instead of Strava, there were stopwatches.

In the UK our sense of collective shame was so strong that we allowed most racing to be legislated off the roads, reasoning that the public’s imagination could be captured just as well by a time trial on a dual carriageway at 6 am. It hasn’t exactly made cycling any more socially acceptable. But still we keep pointing the finger, furrowing a lonely brow, and hoping that somehow, one day, we’ll frown a new social contract into existence that will let us be respected. Just like motorists.

But wait a second. What about the living arrangements of these motorists? Do they live in a house like the cyclists, perpetually disarrayed from the aftermath of some Facebook-promoted, energy drink-fuelled teenage party? Well no. They’ve grown up, moved out of the parents’ house, got their own place, and they’re sipping a sherry in front of Antiques Roadshow before retiring early with a book. But by “retiring early with a book”, I actually mean “playing a fundamental part in the gruesome premature deaths of around 2000 people per year”. And that’s not counting air pollution.

There are some, like the boy racers and the white van men, who haven’t quite grown up, and live in a shared house and we occasionally knock on the door and tell them to keep the noise down. But still, driving is seen as inherently more respectable than cycling. So ask yourself, homeboy, why is that?

The answer, I’m afraid, is going to come as an unwelcome pinprick to the bikey bubble that many of us live in: we’re a minority, just 2% of the transport modal share across the UK as a whole. When I say we’re a minority, I don’t mean to compare the predicament of cyclists to people whose gender, sexuality, ethnicity or religion weighs society against them every single day. We can, after all, just take off our lycra, or don a T-shirt with none of the traditional heraldic badges of Foxes, Leys of Oak, or Troys of Lee.

We can also drive, get the bus, or catch a train, without having to deny a fundamental facet of our identity. But two thirds of people in the UK don’t cycle at all – the highest outright rejection of any mode of transport. And when people don’t personally know a single member of a minority group, and when said group isn’t powerful or influential enough in society to defend itself, it tends to become the butt of jokes, the target for bullies, and the focus of planning objections.

So this is the way of the world, and we’re stuck with it. If tutting doesn’t work, what else can we do? You could try using logical arguments. Relative harm, for example. One eye-popping statistic I saw in, of all places, a local newspaper letters page: motor vehicles have killed 45,000 people in the 21st century, cyclists less than 10. So in this columnist’s opinion, a Gallic shrug is a perfectly acceptable reaction to cyclists jumping the lights, forgetting their lights, or using unnecessarily bright lights (a new entry in the Cycling Outrage Chart, back in 2014).

Of course though, we’re not computational neural networks, we’re animals, just a wax and a shave away from the monkey enclosure. Logic works on us, but not as well as familiar smells and a bit of grooming. So why not try this: get more people cycling. Encourage, cajole, forgive, and above all, look at the nations beginning with D where they’ve already cracked this. The ones where cyclists don’t even have to rely on “respect” to keep them safe, because there’s usually a gert big kerb between them and the drivers. The more numerous our tribe, the more likely we are to assimilate into society and become normal, maybe even loved.

And remember, even if that day never arrives, you don’t have to accept someone else’s definition of you. We’re supposed to be the species who stand out from all the rest by having the best-developed sense of self-awareness. Perhaps we need to start acting like it.