Matthew's Journal

How many times have you been deliberately attacked with a deadly weapon by a cyclist, threatening you with serious injury ? These kinds of attacks by drivers are an experience that almost every cyclist (at least in Cambridge) has often; normally the actual injury and damage is avoided by the cyclist submitting entirely to the motor-lord.

For that matter, how many times have you been on foot and forced to stop by a driver driving on a pavement, or failing to give way at a zebra crossing, or going through a red light ? How many times have you been prevented from walking on the road - as is your right! - by the intimidation you would face from drivers of motor vehicles? (You do know, don't you, that in law pedestrians have an absolute right of priority over vehicles even on the carriageway, with some very limited exceptions. If you feel like walking in the road, perhaps because the pavement is too narrow for the people who want to use it, in law the drivers must give way to you.)

I've been physically struck by a bus while standing still, as a pedestrian, on the pavement in Magdalene Street. Driving your vehicle on the pavement is a crime - but a crime that is never punished unless the vehicle is a bicycle and the risk is negligible!

The vast majority of pedestrians and cyclists just put up with all this as if it were the natural order of things.

I don't condone the antisocial activities of bad cyclists. But they are completely irrelevant to any discussion of problems on the roads. Cyclists kill about one person a year in Britain. Drivers are the leading cause of early death!

If you're mainly a pedestrian I think you should open your eyes to the real problem, which is not antisocial cycling. Antisocial cycling is rude and irritating. Antisocial driving is deadly violence.

Ian Jackson