Cycling

Trevor David Clifton

Motor vehicles should be confined to major roads, except between the hours of ten p.m. and six a.m. I’m unlikely to be out on my bike then.

Currently the recommended clearance between car and bike, when the car is overtaking, is 1.5 metres. Not many drivers know this. And I assume the same separation distance is required if the two are travelling in opposite directions.

In the road where I live there are long rows of cars parked nose-to-tail on both sides. There isn’t enough space in the middle for a bike and a car and 1.5m between them. So, if that recommendation should become law, either cyclists or motor vehicles would have to be banned. So it’s not likely to happen, is it?… Unless … riding on the pavement was legalised. What about that? It would keep the hunters and the hunted safely separated.

The pavement is where parents put their little children on their first, tiny bicycles! So why wouldn’t those toddler cyclists grow up thinking that riding a bike on the pavement is the norm?

If people were allowed to ride their bikes on the pavement, there would have to be rules: there would need to be a minimum distance between a pedestrian and an approaching bicycle, before reaching which, the cyclist would have to ring his bicycle bell. A safe distance between bicycle and pedestrian when overtaking would have to be established, and who would have priority if the pavement was too narrow? What should be the rule for a toddler with a grown-up in each hand? There would have to be a speed limit for the bikes, and the pedestrian section in the Highway Code would have to include the requirement for people to open their front door and look left and right before stepping onto the pavement. There would need to be guidance and regulation for mums with prams, and old people with shopping trolleys. I can see a growing, developing requirement for more civil servants… a ministry even, for the Assessment, Formulation, Implementation and Application of Overtaking Regulations – the MAFIA of OR! Oh! Wouldn’t it be grand? I’d probably get an OBE!

But I suppose, in reality, I will carry on squashing myself against a car – or preferably but not always possible, in the gap between two cars – to watch the drivers of approaching SUVs gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead as they accelerate towards me with the obvious intention of ‘not seeing’ should one of their giant wing-mirrors disconnect my elbow from the rest of my arm.

Maybe I should re-develop my short-term memory to record the registration numbers of these monsters as they approach so that, instead of using up my ration of dying words by asking the gallant passer-by-trying-to-help to tell my wife that I love her, I could keep on shouting the registration number of the nasty driver that ran me over, in the hope that prosecution, conviction and severe punishment might follow and, hopefully, the removal of one more demonic, persecutor of cyclists from the roads.

Of course, when I’m driving my car, I think that perhaps I should get a bigger one and frighten the cyclists into increased narrowness.