So, BikeHub reports on research conducted by the University ofWestern England into why “seniors” do so little cycling in the UK, compared
with Denmark or the Netherlands.
I could have told them.
I “celebrated” (if that is the right word) my 60th
last week. Tomorrow is my last day as a
full-time worker – from next week I give up my position as a partner in an
accounting firm and I start a part-time consultancy with them for a year or two. I have already collected my “Senior Railcard”
– which I will need to make my commuting bill manageable as South West Trains
makes no provision for part-timer season tickets and has no apparent intention
of doing so in the foreseeable future.
I digress. My commute
to work is a sandwich, two short cycle trips as the bread with a 50 minute
train ride as the meat. The bottom slice
is a peaceful saunter down a country lane, through the station car park and a
hundred metres or so of busy road to the station entrance. The top slice is from Waterloo to
Blackfriars, over Blackfriars Bridge.
I hope that I will still be working and commuting this route
when the new North-South Cycle Superhighway, whose construction has now started,
is complete and could take me from Stamford Street to a point barely 100 metres
from my office, where Farringdon St meets St Bride St. By then I think I am going to need it.
Why? Firstly, anyone
over 40 will know that your faculties begin to decline with age. My one-time 20/20 vision has now deteriorated
to eth point where I have to increase my reading specs prescription every 2-3
years. I am not quite at the point of
needing specs for driving, but I can’t be far off. More to the point, my strength, stamina and
flexibility are all declining, and I have to work ever harder in the gym to
slow the rate of decline. I am now
overtaken by more often than I overtake other cyclists. I am finding it ever harder to achieve the sprint
speeds and rapid acceleration which John Franklin calls for in his book to be a
vehicular cyclist – a term I deplore although I readily acknowledge that VC is
the only real strategy for staying safe on busy roads. I have mild osteo-arthritis in my left knee
and I know there is only one way that can go – downhill.
Secondly, I am losing my confidence. I am becoming more anxious and more
fearful. That seems to be a common
feature of ageing. Older people’s fears –
of strangers, youth, immigrants, anyone who is somehow “different” from themselves,
may not be laudable but I can understand it as I experience more anxiety about
other things which really don’t matter like whether I forgot to put my phone on
charge. In cycling terms, I am becoming more anxious and less confident about
the behaviour of people around me. Not
only motorists but occasionally other cyclists – I have been unbalanced by
close-passes to my right, and experience an increasing number of close-passes
to my left which, if they unbalanced me, could tip me into the path of something
much heavier and faster and more lethal.
I view most motorists these days with suspicion, even if that great
majority of them are actually not hell-bent on killing me.
But there is one thing about which my anxiety is entirely
rational – fear of injury. As you get older,
you take longer to recover from injury or illness or the effects of an operation. I have had four collisions with cars or taxis
since I took up cycling in London, and the last of these, while really no more
serious than the first three, which I shrugged off, left me in need of an operation
on my shoulder which, 2 ½ years later, I have still not fully recovered from –
in most respects I get along but when my personal trainer makes me do a plank,
it is not my core strength which fails me but my right upper arm and shoulder
which buckle after about a minute. Inability
to recover from injury really frightens me, as I recall how a botched operation
to repair her knee largely immobilised my mother and started her spiral of
decline into eventual dementia and a care home.
(Thank the Lord that she is no longer around to suffer the steep spiral
of decline we can expect in local authority adult social care – they were
piss-poor five years ago, I shudder to think where they are going now).
So, I simply don’t see myself continuing to cycle in central
London for much longer without segregated cycle provision. My travel by bike
has already been curtailed to routes I know well, and where I can stay clear of
the worst situations such as deliberately-narrowed busy streets like Cheapside,
Strand, Pall Mall or Ken High Street.
So roll on the two segregated superhighways. May they be only the first, as I am sure they
will be, when live data hammers home the point beyond even the densest
petrol-head minister’s capacity for self-denial, that they are a brilliant solution
to any city’s transport problems and should be implemented wholesale.
