Emilie Silverwood-Cope: Are things getting worse for cyclists on our roads?
Have you heard of Cycling Mikey, sometimes described as the most hated cyclist in Britain?
He’s got over 100,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel where he posts videos of dangerous drivers. He records them on a camera which is stuck on his cycling helmet and his X (formerly Twitter) bio reads: “Reported 1,555 drivers since 2019. 2,161 penalty points, £129,238 in fines”.
Like lots of Cambridge families, we all head out on our bikes in the morning. I cycle my youngest child to and from primary school, while my older children head out alone. For a city that claims to be bike friendly, I see a lot of moments Cycling Mikey would be filming and reporting.
Is it just me or does it feel like it’s getting so much worse on our local roads? The more I cycle around Cambridge the more paranoid I have become that something is going to happen to one of my children.
It’s not just the number of distracted drivers I see on their phones, but also the state of our roads and cycle lanes. Road markings, including junctions, cycle lane markings and yellow lines are disintegrating along with the tarmac. Close to the pavement, where we have to cycle, the road is crumbling and falling apart. My child’s small bike wheels bump along potholes. I hold my breath as he swerves to avoid the bigger ones. The pavements are not much better.
Huge supermarket delivery trucks join us on our school run. They drive down a narrow two-way street which has been reduced to a single lane thanks to parked cars lined up on one side. There’s simply no space on these narrow Cambridge roads for drivers to leave the recommended 1.5 metres between cyclist and car.
I don’t want to start shouting “It’s all going to hell in a handcart” but it does feel like some kind of social contract has been broken. Double yellow lines don’t seem to matter anymore as people thinking only about their own convenience park on them. They make it impossible for little heads to peer safely into the oncoming road.
While the traffic leaves drivers impatient, off-road cycle paths don’t even seem to count for anything either. Delivery drivers on e-bikes are using them and so are fast e-scooters. There’s no sign to say e-scooters can’t use a shared pavement so they probably think ‘Why not? Who cares? Who is going to stop me?’.
Perhaps the state of our roads have left drivers thinking the same - ‘Why should I care if this is a junction, it’s not painted?’ and why indeed? The potholes, unreadable road markings and patched up roads hardly scream ‘we care about your safety’.
There’s always a car trying to reverse at the Corpus Christi clock because it’s gone the wrong way, and throngs of tourists on the roads. It doesn’t seem to matter that the same road problems arise day after day without anyone coming up with a solution. In the meantime, parents just keep warning children to take care to avoid people, cars, e-scooters, potholes and trucks.
The penalty for being on your phone while driving has been increased to six points to reflect the number of serious incidents: ‘Between 2014 and 2019, a total of 133 fatalities and 446 serious accidents were directly linked to drivers being distracted by their phones – that’s an average of one major incident every three days.’ (The Insurance Factory website).
No one seems particularly deterred by this penalty, and without a Cambridge Cycling Mikey the chance of getting caught is non-existent anyway. Most of us don’t know that driving and looking at a phone causes the same level of impairment as driving drunk yet these drivers, who wouldn’t dream of drinking, are being just as dangerous.
“Look,” I say to my son, pointing out a driver with her head down and scrolling on her phone as she sits in slow moving traffic, “can you see, she isn’t concentrating and that she’s not driving safely?”
I want my children to know that it doesn’t matter if they are cycling perfectly, they still need to assume the driver isn’t aware of them. I send them off with a cheery “Don’t forget there are people out there who don’t even care about their own lives let alone yours!” hoping it will remind them to concentrate.
They are, though, at that blissful age where they think that because nothing bad has happened then nothing bad will happen. Believing they are invincible is an occupational hazard for teenagers so it doesn’t matter how often parents tell their child to wear a helmet and not wear headphones, they do the inverse. Helmets are left swinging over handlebars while headphones are stuck in ears. Children don’t see that the state of our roads leaves them vulnerable, or notice the drivers on their phones.
I’ll leave the last word to Cycling Mikey, who sums up what I suspect most of us believe too: “I’m a driver too, I love cars, but I don’t like dangerous driving and people taking risks with our vulnerable road users.” At least he’s trying to do something about it.
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
