The Bicycle Book

BRITISH ROADS

At the Earl’s Court Cycle Show, the Serious Men are out in force. They are walking the aisles between the stalls, eyes a little narrowed, intent. They’re looking for something, even if they don’t necessarily know what it is. It could be anything – a chain ring, a new brake, even an ordinary ding-dong bicycle bell – as long as it gives them the edge, the thing which will raise them from middle-aged, middle-weight mortality to the Olympian heights of which deep down they know they are still capable. And somewhere amid the coloured rims and the briefcase panniers in matching purple leather, it’s got to be here.

This, for the hard-core urban cyclist, is retail heaven, pure, gasping bike porn. It’s porn because it’s desirable and illicit and a little bit sad, and because most of these men have a private file on their laptop full of tubular things they’d like to stroke after everyone else has gone home. And because it’s porn and because they know it, the Serious Men also know that it’s essential to compensate for that knowledge by pretending to their peers that the difference between Shimano and Campagnolo is right up there with the difference between protons and electrons. For the next three days, lots and lots of cyclists come to worship here, to feed the European economy and to celebrate the fact that bicycles really are adults-only now. Most of them are dressed in normal weekend wear – jeans and trainers, the occasional hardy pair of shorts – but if you look closely, they always have one or two items of cycle gear flagged up like a password. Some have got the right sort of jacket, others are wearing the distinctive quasi-Edwardian combo of plimsolls, thick black leggings and thin plus fours. There are a few with stripy Bianchi caps and others with copies of vintage Arcore jerseys. Others have done no more than roll up the legs of their jeans or forget to take off the second bicycle clip. Quite a large number of them have long-standing hair issues: either it’s in the act of being misplaced or it’s gone completely. Others have accepted the inevitable and are now modelling the new Fall of Saigon-style helmets as a substitute.

Beside the bikes out on the floor are more men, arms folded, waiting in line to give each bike an experimental lift by its crossbar. That casual heft upwards is the urban cyclist’s equivalent of dogs and lampposts, part territorial signature, part statement of intent. When demonstrated outside on the street to a bike one is sizing up or to the ride of a rival, it says two things: one, that the lifter knows enough about bikes to know that weight = cost of materials = amount of money spent = devotion to the cycling cause, and, two, that it will really piss them off if the rival’s bike is lighter than theirs. And so round the bike stands the Serious Men go, lifting crossbars with the same air of familiar authority that perhaps a hundred years ago they would have slapped the rump or checked the pasterns of an attractive yearling. The gaze of the stallholders follows them around, hopeful and assessing. They know perfectly well the Serious Men have money and that they’re prepared to spend it. The trick is to find exactly where, and how.

The Cycle Show is held annually at Earl’s Court and is as good a place as any to gauge the state of the nation’s relationship with bikes. In 2008 during the financial crisis, this place had a conspiratorial quality to it, a sense that here among the long-converted there was some kind of answer to the mayhem beyond the doors. There were relatively few people and those who did appear had probably been riding bikes for twenty years or more. Then, things were still transitional. Many of the stalls still carried with them a sense that cycling was something esoteric, a throwback to a past time. There was a residual air of both apology and of defiance. This was the old campaigning face of British cycling, used to being shoved into the gutter, laughed at, written off. The stalls weren’t particularly professional and only a few places had really bothered to put on a show. The point was really just as much to hang around drinking smoothies and congratulating yourself on having got out of the petrol market before oil exploded in everyone’s faces.

Two years later, there’s a different feeling. It’s more professional. More time and money have been spent, more businesses are emerging. The feeling now is that the bicycle market is a serious contender with proper money to be made and proper middle-aged incomes to be tapped. The big brands have arrived, and are putting on a show. As you walk in there’s a fenced-off area with a cycle track. It’s been done up as a kind of fantasy landscape, with a few plastic trees, a tiny little MTB area and a circuit with a lot of corners.

At present, various bikes are being test-ridden. For a second, if you squint very hard, it almost looks like Amsterdam. The number of people flogging different sorts of cycle-related clothing has increased enormously; lots and lots of tasteful jackets, half a mile of black and white merino-base layers, a lot of labels involving the word ‘wicking’. There are coloured wheels and kit for triathlons. There are bullhorn bars, fancy bidons, courier bags and enough hi-visibility gear to start a building site. There are a couple of places selling assorted bits of bicycle knick-knackery (bar ends, novelty saddles) which, no matter the angle you examine them from, still somehow manage to look like sex toys. There are jackets and helmets, socks and trouser clips, bibs and shorts. There is a very great deal of Lycra. Above all, there is an atmosphere of purpose, a sense that here among the children of the new cycling revolution there are vital things to be done and said and bought, a feeling that critical mass either has been reached or is very close to being reached. None of these cyclists (except perhaps the women) looks marginal any more.

By the Condor stand, where the bikes have been placed in alcoves and spotlit like exhibits in a gallery, the men stand in worship, hands behind their backs and weight on one hip. Beside the most attractive bikes, a little crowd forms. Someone strokes a crossbar, someone else gives a tyre a friendly pinch. The lights give the paint on the frames an impression of infinite depth and sparkle so the green is as green as the Emerald City. The saddles are black or retro leather, and so spare in shape they look like medieval arrowheads. In the eyes of the men are such expressions of longing that the discreet price tags beside the bikes begin to seem less like statements of fact than taunts. With that, the eyes say, you could go as fast as carbon fibre, you could go as fast as a car – maybe you could even go as fast as Armstrong. With that, you could ride right off the edge of the city and into the sky. Some of them tap the tyres one more time and then move on, regretful. Others just stay, wandering in circles round and round the different bikes, gazing.

It is only when you get outside the Exhibition Centre that you come down to earth. This is London. Here on the streets of Earl’s Court there is no brave new world where the bicycle reigns supreme, and no matter how hard you squint it never looks like Amsterdam. There are certainly a few cyclists moving to and fro, but they are dwarfed by the numbers of cars, buses, motorbikes and vans. There are HGVs with busted mirrors and mothers driving battered Polos distracted by squabbling children in the back. There are van drivers with lunchtime sandwiches smearing their dashboards and couples in estate cars arguing about parking. There are dispatch riders on motorbikes overtaking bendy buses and skinny blonde women driving obese black SUVs. There are black cabs and delivery lorries, a Civic-full of ladies, minicabs and Transits. It’s the usual London streetscape, the same mixture of bricks, wind and barely suppressed impatience as probably existed a couple of hundred years ago. The cyclists who are here only slip in and out of an existing scene. In this particular area, there are no cycle lanes (unless a desultory sketch of a figure of eight in the gutter can be called a cycle lane) and no special pleading. There’s nothing here that acknowledges the bicycle or even the motorbike. If you want to cycle, then you have to do so on four-wheeled terms. The same picture extends out past the SW postcodes, through the centre, the north and the west, out past the river to the suburban hinterlands. If you try cycling in Bristol or Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow, the geography might vary significantly but the logistics don’t. Bristol and York both pride themselves on providing for cyclists. Cambridge and Oxford have been getting students and tutors to and from lectures by bicycle for decades. Lincoln and Ipswich both look as if they were rolled out on the flatlands with nothing but cyclists in mind. But, in practice, cyclists still play second fiddle to cars in every city in Britain.

But there are perks to being the transport system’s perpetual underdog. For a start, it means that officialdom’s efforts are concentrated elsewhere, so planners and people with parking tickets generally leave you alone. It also means that cyclists tend to find routes away from the main arterial roads, and thus end up with their own private transport network. Cycle through Bloomsbury, or along the many hidden canal towpaths which still join England’s cities together, or near Richmond Park, and you’ll find yourself joining if not quite a movement of population on a Chinese scale, then something astonishing. There are bicycle traffic jams by Tottenham Court Road and bicycle gridlocks on Parkway. In winter, you could sit near the major cycle lanes and watch more flashing lights pass by than in the sky near Heathrow.

And because cycling is currently set up to favour the rebellious and the broke, it means that cyclists can never be homogenised into a single grey entity. One of the lovely things about riding round a city – any city – is watching other cyclists and savouring their strangeness. There is not and never has been one single urban type, and there never really could be. The figures are rising – between 2001 and 2008, the numbers of people in the UK who cycle regularly rose from 2.3 million to 3.2 million and the numbers of cyclists in London doubled – but all that rise seems to have done is to increase the diversity. Wait near a frequently used route and watch the cyclists streaming past during the morning and evening rush hours. After a bit the scene begins to appear like the Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall; many different groups jostling for dominance, a total restructuring of social politics, lawlessness, occasional outbreaks of violence, lots of exceptionally bad clothing. For every rider blazing with gadgetry, there’s another on a bike which looks as if it was cobbled together out of old chair legs and office stationery. There are packs of Ridgebacks all racing each other to the junction, there are old ladies on things which look like two-wheeled shopping trolleys, there are men in suits and pillocks on Bianchis. There are government-issue cyclists who are either very afraid of breaking the law or very afraid of being caught on camera while breaking the law, and there are those for whom the law is an entirely optional concept. There are those who ride like they belong on a bike and there are those who ride like they’d rather be in an armoured vehicle. There are those who have helmets, those who don’t, and those who sport different headgear entirely – woolly bonnets, Santa hats, things with built-in headphones. There are businessmen on space-age racers going at the same pace as girls on silver single-speeds. There are those for whom The Look evidently matters more than either The Bike or The Ability to Ride That Bike. There are people who look like they know what they’re doing, and those who are obviously bluffing. There are guys on low-riders, slung out half reclining like Dennis Hopper on a Harley, and those who have evidently forgone the stern mistress of style for the stairlift of practicality. There are those who cycle in skirts, there are those who cycle in overcoats, there are those who wouldn’t dream of cycling in anything other than six-inch red stilettos. There are fluorescent commuters on their spanking new hybrids and lardy boys twiddling along on folding bikes like elephants on beach balls. There are tourists on Boris Bikes and lots of kids of seventeen trying to get home on a BMX without being seen by anyone who knows them, and there are ladies who are Doing Their Bit for the environment. There are those who cycle with a child at either end, and there are those who prefer to load the bike like they do in Cambodia. Just like London itself, everyone is represented; every age, every class, every race and religion.

Cycling here is not like cycling in either the Netherlands or India. It does not rely, as in Holland, on the knowledge that the cyclist has a legal and moral right to be there, or, as in India, on the assumption that by getting on a bicycle the cyclist has proved himself so existentially inferior that he has no rights at all. It relies instead on the principle that you must fight your own corner. Once on a bike, you realise very quickly that everyone else on the road is cleaving to an irrefutable truth: that whatever form of transport you happen to be using at that moment – car, bus, own two feet – is the only possible right one, and all other forms should cede to it instantly. You must therefore make it clear to all other road users that you too would like to arrive at your destination safely and promptly, even if you have to dance on the grave of every rule in the Highway Code to do so. Still, after only a few short weeks, it doesn’t even occur to you that the experience you have just had and the way you have therefore learned to cycle is the exception, not the rule. If you were to behave like you do here in Berlin or Amsterdam or Shanghai, you would be regarded – and rightly so – as a complete idiot. For better or worse, you have joined the ranks of Britain’s feral cyclists.

Which leads on to another interesting discovery. What really bothers many cyclists is not other vehicles, but other cyclists. General traffic begins to fade from main event to mere backdrop. You realise that you have a much more pressing issue to deal with in dropping the guy on the white single-speed and making sure he stays dropped. Or riding down the man who just overtook you on a vastly inferior piece of kit. Or – most satisfactory, this – knowing the city better than the person you’re racing, taking a nifty shortcut and emerging a few hundred yards ahead of them at a crucial stage in the game. If you get five cyclists lined up in front of the lights, they may not acknowledge each other’s existence, they may never make eye contact with anything other than the pavement, but there’s a reasonable bet that four out of them will be working out how to annihilate the fifth. And if you can arrive at work having maintained the purity of your trajectory and having been overtaken by nothing but cars, then it will cheer you up for the whole day.

There were many reasons behind cycling’s miraculous resurrection – the introduction of the Congestion Charge in London, a succession of scares about rising fuel costs, terrorism. On the day of the July bombings in 2005, the Evans Cycle franchise announced that they’d sold over four times as many bikes as usual. Some were sold because, with half the city’s transport links in ribbons, there was no other way of getting home, and some because what had happened that day had frightened many people so badly they were never going to go back underground. But beyond the bombings or the Congestion Charge there was something else – a more profound swell of enthusiasm for bicycles and their benefits. Government policy had nothing to do with it; for the past ten years, local and national initiatives on cycling have trailed well behind the deeper trends.

Unfortunately, as politicians are now beginning to realise, by marginalising cycling for decades they have managed to turn a bunch of mild and herbivorous middle-class individuals into a bunch of fit, trained and highly assertive lawbreakers. Since cyclists were faced with a landscape which either took no interest in them or appeared keen on actively eliminating them, they had to work out how to stay safe. The solution for many was to develop a style of cycling based on a combination of mountain biking, road racing and BMX skills with a dash of gymnastics thrown in for good measure. Proper observation of the rules of the road had absolutely nothing to do with it; the law ignored them, so they would ignore the law. Or, rather, every time they got on a bike, they made the law anew on a case-by-case basis. It wasn’t like being a driver where you had to pass a test and where the way you behaved was strictly regulated by the nature of roads and other road users. If you were a cyclist, you could make a decision every time you got into the saddle about whether to cycle furiously or easily, about whether this trip was going to be about taking on the fixie at the roundabout or restricting your sense of competition to giving three taxis the finger. Some might stop at one red light because it’s a crossroads, but they almost certainly won’t stop at the next and definitely not when they’re racing someone else. They would never ride on the pavement except when it would be ridiculous not to. Some days, they’ll ride straight over pedestrian crossings, other days they won’t. Plainly, explaining to the courts that today you broke the law because you felt like it but yesterday you didn’t break it because you couldn’t be bothered is not a realistic defence. But it does make you feel a lot more alive.

There is, of course, a more sinister flip side to all this. Alison Parker is a partner at Hodge Jones Allen, a London law firm specialising in personal injury. She exudes reassurance and competence, and has the kind of unforced gravitas that comes from doing and knowing your chosen subject very well for a long time. A sizeable proportion of her clients are cyclists. ‘You cycle yourself, presumably?’ Yes, I say. ‘Well, I absolutely don’t, and I wouldn’t cycle in London – I consider it to be completely suicidal. I wouldn’t do it, I just wouldn’t do it. Probably because I see too many incidents. The problem is that when a cyclist comes into contact with a very large vehicle, they are absolutely bound to come off worse.’

We meet at a restaurant near her firm, and on one of the paper table mats Parker sketches out the four classic accidents to befall urban cyclists. First is the cyclist coming down on the inside of heavy traffic. The lane of waiting traffic parts to allow a car to turn right, the car goes straight into the cyclist. Second is on a roundabout: the cyclist sticks to the outside while the car takes the inner route but then pulls across the path of the cyclist when they reach their exit. (‘Go round on the inside and indicate outwards. Or get off and walk round the roundabout – that’s my advice.’) Third is people opening car doors directly into the path of a cyclist – either the passenger door in stationary traffic, or the driver’s door in a line of parked cars. Fourth, and most notorious, is the HGV making a left-hand turn. There’s a cyclist on the inside by the curb, the HGV swings out to the right, the cyclist rides into the gap and is then crushed by the HGV as it turns to the left. Of the thirteen cyclist fatalities in London during 2009, nine were killed in this way by HGVs. Sight lines on HGVs are notoriously poor – a cyclist or a pedestrian has to be several yards in front of the cab before they become visible – and the drivers are simply unaware that there’s a cyclist anywhere close. ‘The advice is NEVER to go into that gap. It’s safer just to hang back.’ Eight of the nine HGV fatalities during 2008 were women. As cyclists, women are more cautious and law-abiding than men, and more prone to tuck themselves into corners at junctions where drivers can’t see them.

The combination of physical risk and environmental smugness is a potent one, and when they first take up cycling many commuters go through a phase of almost radioactive self-righteousness. After all, if you feel you own the moral high ground and you’re doing something a little bit scary at the same time, then you might well reach the mystical god-like state called Always Being in the Right. Big mistake. After a couple of years, the best urban cyclists mellow, realise they didn’t personally invent cycling and get on with reaching their destination. The bad ones just keep arguing until someone breaks their jaw. ‘As a pedestrian in London,’ says Parker, laughing, ‘I really hate cyclists! They never bloody well stop at zebra crossings, and I’m more likely to be road-raged as a pedestrian than I ever am when I’m behind the wheel of a car. There are some very arrogant and cavalier cyclists in London who would happily mow you down. I think cyclists, particularly in cities, do have a mindset that everyone’s against them.’ After all that, it almost comes as a relief to hear Parker has an even riskier group of clients than cyclists. ‘I’ve always thought that motorcycling is a bit like smoking – if someone had realised when they were invented how incredibly dangerous they are, they would never have been allowed, a bit like cigarettes. It’s too late now. You’re on two wheels, you’ve got no stability, no protection at all round your body, and you’re sitting on 1,000cc of engine, and doing 80mph – I mean, how dangerous is that? I just find it mind-boggling every time I think about it. Stay on four wheels, or on two wheels where you’re travelling at a speed where you’re much more in control of what happens if you come off.’

Muratori’s Café is at the junction of Farringdon Road and Margery Street opposite the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office. It’s an old-style kind of café – a London greasy spoon with warmth and Formica but without the reek of grease. There’s wood panelling on the walls and tabloids on the benches, and once in a while someone emerges from the kitchen with a comment or a joke to refill each cup with tea. Outside the huge corner windows, the view is of rain and wet cyclists. Muratori’s has been a cabbie’s refuge for years, and this particular afternoon – slimy, cold, early Feb – the place is half full.

The following lively exchange of views is interesting not because it’s unexpected, but because, for an hour or so, it’s salutary to imagine what it must feel like to be a cabbie driving in circles round London’s endless frustrations. Cabbies have always felt an enormous sense of ownership about any city they work in. They’re part of the place; London would not be the city it is without them. And since they feel they belong to these streets, then one of two things happens. Either they’re completely secure in that knowledge and very laid-back about everything, or they’re monumentally pissed off at all the things on the road that they feel don’t have as much right to be there as they do.

BB: So have you ever cut up a cyclist?

Les (taxi no. 30839): No!

Unanimous shouting from everyone round the table: No! No, no, no!

Les: Seriously! Because the last thing I want is a cyclist bashing my cab.

Keith (taxi no. 30729): Because we know we’re on a loser. Even if you do nothing wrong, you’re on a loser.

BB: That isn’t most people’s experience. Most people have been cut up by a cab at some point.

Mickey (taxi no. 54316): Yeah, OK, but let’s say that happens, come up and talk to me, don’t bang on the wing mirror and when I get out, cycle off. I’ve seen a cab and when the guy got out, the cyclist rode round and round tormenting him because he knew any time the guy got near him he could just cycle off.

Keith: They’re so aggressive, aren’t they? They bang your bonnet, bang your wing mirror and then they cycle off, they won’t stay around to argue. That’s what really pisses me off.

BB: Do you think all cyclists are the same?

Keith: Yeah. You can generalise with cyclists.

BB: So you don’t discriminate between people who are cycling for work, couriers, and other cyclists?

Keith: They’re all the same.

Les: You do meet the odd one with the lights on and the yellow stuff all over and the backpacks and everything, and they generally stick to the rules. But the ones who are riding around with next to nothing on, just a bit of Lycra, zooming about delivering stuff, they will take the mickey, no doubt about it. I don’t go out of my way to get in their way, but I just find it’s hard to avoid them sometimes.

BB: They’re just doing a job, same as you.

Les: I understand that, but if they come up the side as they do, if you look at any of our cabs, there’ll be little scrape marks along the paintwork. Now, if I go in the garage for that, they’ll go, £50 mate. I’m not going to get that back off them, never in a million years. And that happens every day.

Paul (didn’t give his driver number): You know what it all boils down to? There’s no punishment. They don’t think the law applies to them.

Steve (over at table in corner): There’s a place where all the paramedics go, the guys who deal with all the bad accidents and things, and their entertainment when they’re sitting waiting for a call is watching the traffic lights to see how many cyclists stop. They say they actually take a tally. Nine out of ten don’t bother.

Les: I don’t understand why they’ve always got to push to the front.

BB: Because if you don’t, you’re invisible and you’re stuck behind some trucker’s exhaust.

Les: Yes, but I still don’t think, well, I’ve got to commit suicide, push myself in front of a lorry, just because I’m breathing a bit of crap. I’d sit a few yards back.

Keith: There should be some sort of registration for them.

I know it’s difficult and it should be free at first, but they should be registered. Because every cyclist, that’s one less car on the road, and that’s great. But you still can’t have them all banging and breaking things.

Mickey: If they knock off your wing mirror, scratch the side of the cab, smash your back light, there’s nothing you can do. There’s no comeback. They just ride off. There’s no way of recognising them again. The old cabs used to have a diesel cap on the back. Many times, they just hold onto that and get dragged along by a cab rather than cycle.

Les (reflectively): There’s a lot of anger, isn’t there? A lot of anger coming out of people. See, most cab drivers know we’re not going to get anywhere quickly. So we don’t drive fast. We know – I’ve had twenty-nine years’ experience of knowing I’m not going to get anywhere. We’ll get there eventually, but there’s no point in rushing.

BB: But the point is, you can get somewhere quick on a bike.

Keith: See, that’s the trouble. That’s their mindset – I can get past that, I can go faster, I can get across town. But they’ve still got to realise they’ve got to stop at a red light.

BB: If every cyclist suddenly stopped at every red light, would you start respecting them?

Les: Well, I don’t know …

Keith: Get ’em off the roads. Cycle lanes, whatever, just get ’em off the roads.

Les: License them.