Cycling scapegoats: addendum

After my last post about cycling scapegoats, John pointed me in the direction of a recent Evening Standard article. The person behind this anti-cycling ranting in Westminster council is Angela Harvey, chairman of the Built Environment Policy and Scrutiny Committee and of the South Area Forum. She also spoke on yesterday's BBC's Radio 5 Weekend Breakfast programme. (It's a 3 hour programme so skip forward to 1:41:00 for the 5 minute feature.) After her Standard assertion about a rogue cyclo-terrorist:

We're always getting little old ladies who are knocked down and abused by a cyclist, who leave them on the ground as they ride away.

was apparently hit by a Freedom of Information request and found to be red-light jumping reality, she dropped this fantasy and, stressing that she is a cyclist, talked about towpath prams:

...cyclists are rushing through and we may end up with a pram in the canal. That's what we're very worried about.

I'm not quite sure how giving Council officers powers to issue fixed penalty notices to cyclists for road traffic offences can have anything to do with Regent's Canal racers. Last time I looked, canals weren't on a public highway. British Waterways affairs actually have nothing to do with what the residents have talked about. And the reason cyclists use the towpaths is because they want somewhere quiet, flat, red-light free to commute and exercise on. Because the roads are jammed up with traffic. Towpath use - responsible towpath use - is actually relieving the strain on Westminster's roads and they aren't thinking of improving cycle provision apart from the City Hall inspired cycle hire initiative*. Each cyclist on the towpath is one fewer on the road. And each cyclist on the road is taking up far less room than the alternative modes of transport.

So, because Angela Harvey has a bee in her bonnet about cyclists, they're damned for being on the roads (knocking down old ladies) and for being off the roads (pushing prams into the canal).
If you want to see this Angela Harvey, she was last seen riding roughshod over Westminster Bridge on a red Vendetta.

*For a cheap laugh, the minutes of Westminster's cycle workshop are worth a read. Whereas we only get a cycle hire scheme, they actually get a Cycle High Scheme

Cycling scapegoats

Evidently taking its cue from the Daily Mail school of journalism, the BBC's Inside Out (London) broadcast a piece on red-light jumping cyclists in the city last night. As any journalist writing an ''Opinion''* article in the Mail will know, the best way to kick things off is to appeal to prejudices with the all-time classic cycling cliché: the lycra lout. These are the opening words of Matthew Wright's presentation:

''I think we're all familiar with the capital's lycra louts, that breed of cyclist that bombs about the street, flouting the Highway Code, missing pedestrians by a whisker and giving the vast majority of sensible riders a bad name. Well, thanks to pressure from those who've borne the brunt of bad riding, councils and the Met police are starting to clamp down on these two-wheel transgressors....''

Well, so much for challenging stereotypes, eh? The rest of the piece showed lots of cycling clips, many perfectly law-abiding cyclists and the odd dangerous and illegal manoeuvre. And what do you know? None of the transgressors filmed were wearing lycra. That wasn't the point though, was it? I don't know how many hours the film crew spent trying to nail a shot of a lycra wearing cyclist breaking the law or putting pedestrians in danger, but they didn't manage to film a single one doing it. (They did admittedly manage to get one fellow in lycra being pulled for an infraction but missed the actual offence.) But though the film failed to nail any of these two-wheeled lycra lout transgressors, the stereotyping remained unchallenged and, if anything, was reinforced.

Now, I'm not going to defend red-light jumping. But having twice been alarmed yesterday by the sudden acceleration of a car behind me making a dash through a ''London green,'' while I was already slowing for the red light, I will argue for a sense of perspective. Which is more dangerous, a cyclist weighing under 100kg travelling at 15mph or a motor vehicle accelerating through a red light? This is not a particularly difficult question.

What I find most unsettling about this picking on sound-bite scapegoats is that it diverts attention away from the real dangers on the road. Focusing on the cyclist blinds us to where the dangers actually are - and this is why I use the word ''scapegoat.'' Drivers see the hi-viz motes but not the beam in their own eyes.

And as an illustration of that selective blindness, here's a still from the programme. Yes, before a bevy of bobbies, we can all see the cyclist red-light jumping. But unremarked and uncriticised in the programme, what's that behind the cyclist? Oh, they didn't notice the big blue thing in the background. Because they were busy concentrating on cyclists. Perspective, please!
*''Opinion'' here is used by the press to evade censure. ''It's not a reflection of our editorial policy, the views expressed are those of the commissioned author.'' Right, that went well, let's commission another piece....