Cycling woes (From Harrow Times)

Cycling woes

11:47am Friday 27th June 2003

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IT IS with trepidation that we return to the subject of cycling. A passing reference to the subject in this column a few weeks ago has inspired a stream of correspondence, which continues, and a few personal slurs on the integrity and sanity of the writer.

The original mention was a throwaway line in a Comment about Tinker, the cat who inherited a house, observing that, free from the obligation to pay Harrow's council tax, he would not be contributing a penny to building cycle lanes that no-one uses.

Then, we reported on how a row of beautiful, mature trees in North Harrow were being felled to make way for a very fancy cycle track being installed along Broadwalk. A strange thing to do given that the 'two wheels good, four wheels bad" brigade argues that we should all take up cycling to save the environment. (That week, we received information from the Woodland Trust promoting its "cycle to save trees" campaign.)

Much of the North Harrow cycle lane is now complete and open for business, but a colleague who lives within sight of it reports that he has seen only a handful of cyclists using it: most still prefer to perversely pedal along the pavement, alongside the track, scattering pedestrians as they go.

Cyclists who have written to this newspaper, argue that they can not use most cycle lanes because they are full of parked cars. But this excuse does not hold in North Harrow where the track has been carved out of the wide pavements, well away from the road.

Could it be the sheer bloody-mindedness of the self-righteous?

In a debate on Radio 4 the other day, speakers for the both the pro and anti-cycling lobbies agreed on one thing: that, in general, cyclists hold a firm belief that the law of the land and the Highway Code do not apply to them, blithely riding the wrong-way up one-way streets and jumping red lights, secure in the knowledge that the police can't be bothered to prosecute them, as they would a motorist committing the same crimes.

If cyclists want to be taken seriously and have taxpayer's pounds showered up on them, they ought to start behaving responsibly and legally, and submit themselves to the same controls as other-road users: testing, licencing, taxation and insurance.

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