Why do so many cyclists have to look like a character from “The
Roswell Incident”?
This morning on my way into work, astride my Brompton,
dressed in a cotton long-sleeve business
shirt and navy blue cotton chinos, I come up at the lights behind a guy on a
carbon (I guess) road bike with skinny tyres, derailleur gears and treadless skinny
rims. His attire comprised cleated
shoes, lycra shorts and jersey, helmet and shades, topped off with a natty
Rapha rucsac.
All for the journey into work. At least I guess that was his plan – he wasn’t
practising for Le Tour de France.
I think this was a fairly extreme case, but it is a
commonplace that London cyclists ride derailleur-geared bikes – when hub gears
are far more practical for stop-start at lights and junctions – without mudguards
or panniers, and they wear broadly sporty clothing, shorts and tees even in
cold weather.
But, isn’t that just part of a vicious circle, a feedback
loop? People ride in what is comfortable
for the style of riding they want to adopt, and on machines which they
consider, on balance, to be more efficient for the style of riding they want to
adopt. That style is VC – behave like a
motor vehicle, occupy the road and keep up with the traffic. Because that is what makes them feel safe and
tolerably comfortable in the traffic conditions.
It also reinforces their alien quality, their otherness,
which validates in the minds of non-cyclists their dislike and distrust of them. It excuses politicians and engineers for
disregarding the interests of cyclists, allocating virtually no money to their
needs despite the fact that they pay quite substantially towards the roads (as
all taxpayers do – “road tax” is pitifully inadequate to cover the true cost of
roads) and then taking back even what they have allocated. The result is no or insufficient good cycle
infrastructure which would otherwise bring ordinary people in ordinary clothes
on ordinary utility bicycles out of hiding, leaving the roads still dominated
by “Small Grey”, and so the cycle continues.
Only two days ago, I was passing the works on a section of
the new East-West superhighway on the Embankment in front of the Whitehall government
buildings and Portcullis House – in a taxi, as I maintain you might not need to
be mad to cycle there, but it certainly helps – and I could see that a fairly
respectable width of track was being created behind a clearly defined line of
kerbstones. It is good to see that this
is actually happening. Let’s hope that
when it is finished, it sees lots of new cyclists riding those ordinary bikes
in those ordinary clothes, at a sedate jogging pace with occasional stops to
respect the traffic lights imposed on the route. With that perhaps we will see firstly the
irrefutable empirical proof that infrastructure is good both for cycling and for
all other modes of transport, and secondly an appreciation from the general
public that “cyclists” are just people, trying to go about their normal
business, only on a bicycle.
