Dave Hill: Leadership is required to combat London’s selfish cycling culture

Let’s not get carried away, but there are a few small signs that some of London’s progressive politicians are, at long last, waking up to the everyday menace of antisocial behaviour by cyclists and the need to do something about it.

Last week at City Hall, the London Assembly Labour group supported a call for Sadiq Khan to establish a “fully-independent review” of the impact of so-called floating bus stops on disabled people and to potentially arrange their removal. Across town, Brent Council issued an ultimatum to Lime, the company whose e-bikes block and litter London’s pavements, to do something about it or be banished from the borough. And prior to that, a central London Labour MP urged the government to provide stronger local powers to regulate e-bikes’ misuse.

These are steps in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go if the delinquent behaviour by people travelling in London on two wheels is to be curbed. You see it all over the city, all the time, every day: red lights ignored; zebra crossings ignored; cycling on pavements, sometimes at considerable speeds, sometimes motorised; Lime bikes dumped without a second’s consideration for the nuisance they cause for other people, particularly those who already have difficulty getting around.

London’s cycling champions, of whom there are many in high and influential places, promote it as a means of transport that enhances the city’s street environments, improving air quality and lessening congestion by providing an alternative to using cars. But bicycles don’t clean air, evidence of switching from driving to pedalling remains scarce and far too often cycling is having negative effects, as the selfishness of far too many cyclists creates annoyance, anxiety and sometimes physical danger for the vastly larger number of people getting around on foot.

It doesn’t help that cycling activists get touchy when this is pointed out. I recently published on social media a photograph of Lime bikes clustered by the entrance to my local Overground station at morning peak time, impeding people going in and out by foot and passers-by alike. It was an image which, I said, captured why so many people find London’s cycling culture alienating.

The response was as large, indignant and predictable as usual – a days-long chorus of deflection, special pleading and denial: the Lime bike blockage was not, apparently, the fault of those who did the blocking but a forgivable consequence of failures by “corporate” Lime; there was the customary rush to change the subject to the sins of cars; the routine rule-breaking was dismissed as scarce or as something cyclists are “forced” to do by the cruel injustices they face; it was even contended that criticising cyclists is a form of “othering“, as if it were akin to racism. The latter case is made on behalf of a demographic dominated by affluent white males. Which is the greater, the narcissism or the solipsism?

We used to associate motorcyclists with tearaway behaviour. Today, they stand out as the only two-wheeled travllers who don’t feel entitled to take to pavements whenever it suits them. In theory, cycling, battery-powered or otherwise, should be enhancing London streets of every kind, helping to make them more tranquil, attractive and hospitable. Instead, far, far too often, cyclists are, like e-scooterists, contributing to the degeneration of London streets – high streets in particular – into places of incivility, anxiety and depressing, low-level lawlessness.

Addressing this requires action on several fronts, not least leadership on changing antisocial cyclists’ attitudes. Having the safety of floating bus stops assessed by someone other than Transport for London might be useful, but if cyclists could be persuaded to travel through them slowly and considerately instead of at alarming speeds, disregarding their tiny zebras along the way, they would be less of a worry for those many who must now nervously negotiate them. Legal powers and public pressure could get Lime and others to put their houses in better order, but would that alone persuade their boy-racer customers to keep to the carriageway and stop frightening pensioners?

That leadership needs to come from the top. The London Cycling Campaign looks like a lost cause, but politicians, journalists and policy thinkers who want to see London’s street environments improve could all speak up for good cycling habits and against the sorts of thoughtless behaviour that attracts more apologism than condemnation. Individual cyclists with the same positive priorities could join in.

Mayor Khan could play an important part by appealing for more responsible cycling as part of a larger campaign to revive and renew London’s hard-hit leisure and shopping neighbourhoods, in line with the government’s quest for greater economic growth and reductions in ASB.

Debate about safe road design is fine, and fresh legal powers, effectively enforced, would be a help. But what is needed most of all is a new social contract, a code for considerate street interactions, that Londoners across the board can sign up to and tacitly, tolerantly enforce. Nobody minds if cycling rules are bent gently now and again to accommodate small children learning to ride their bikes or the completion of the last few yards of a longer excursion. It’s the arrogant assumption that rules are for other people that has become unacceptable.

Where floating bus stops are concerned, the Assembly’s Tory group, in particular Emma Best, has taken the lead. It was a Tory amendment to a motion about the need for a London disability champion that put the matter on the Assembly agenda last week. Labour AMs were right to back it. If the welfare and freedoms of blind and other disabled people isn’t a Labour issue, what is?

London’s cycling culture ought to be a credit to the city, a point of pride for all, not a source of avoidable strife and resentment that hinders more than it helps the cycling cause. Labour is now the party of national as well as of London government. There will never be a better time for it to stand up and be counted on behalf of the majority of Londoners – and, I’d like to think, the majority of London’s cyclists too.

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