There is irrefutable evidence of a thriving cycling culture in the Bible. A veritable festival of cycling.

In Isaiah 29 verse 1 it clearly says: “Add year to year and let your cycle of festivals go on.” 

Ok, so this evidence is not so much irrefutable as straw-clutching, but who’s to say this might not just be a bad translation?

Returning to the twenty-first century: Pedestrians hate car drivers, who in turn hate lorry drivers, and everybody hates cyclists… but most of us are at least three of these!

Cycle safety is in the news, and whilst it is rarely good news, on this occasion the main thrust is that the responsibility for keeping cyclists safe on the roads should not be solely that of the cyclist.

The latest thinking is that motor vehicle drivers and indeed town planners should take at least an equal share in this responsibility. That means that hi-vis Lycra and space-age helmet technology are not enough. In fact they could be counter-productive in the long-term as they send the message that in order to be safe on your pedals, you need to dress as if preparing for battle. This mind-set is enough to deter many people from cycling, and the fewer cyclists there are, the less of a priority they become.

Our book, Crapper Cycle Lanes, does a lot more than poke fun at some of the most egregious examples of town councils’ failure to provide sensible cycle routes. It raises the question of whether cycle lanes in their current form even make things worse, not better for cyclists. Strips of road are deemed to be “safe” for cyclists by painting a six centimetre wide white line at an arbitrary distance from the kerb. This gives car, van and lorry drivers the false assumption that they may drive as close as they like to this line, which often means they give less space to cyclists when overtaking them. The painted line does not provide some car-proof force-field.

Rod King received an MBE for his work on road safety, and was instrumental in the establishing of the 20’s Plenty scheme. In his foreword for Crapper Cycle Lanes he notes that 16 million people in the UK now live in an area covered by the 20 mph speed limit. This is real progress.

We recognise that due to the way our towns and cities have developed it is a far-fetched idyll to expect a complete network of traffic-free cycle routes. Until then, we can just do our bit to raise awareness, and hope that more people will see things from the two-wheelers’ point of view.

In an ideal world there would be wide, bike-only paths along which we would be able to cycle to work and on which our children could learn to ride, enjoying the activity as nature always intended, as shown by another verse from the Good Book:

Ezekiel 1:20. “Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.”