Sorry, but Cyclists make Poor Law

They are so vexing.
Cyclists, I mean. Not all of them. Just enough of them to make a nuisance of themselves.

Do not mistake me. I don't mind cycles at all. I have one myself, still in good order after all these years. It doesn't get enough use. Do you know, I may even take it out for a spin next year and do the 18 mile version of the great Nottingham bike ride.

I have ridden cycles ever since I was a small child, and when I was 11 years old, on my splendid new electric blue Trent Tourist with all of three Sturmey Archer gears, I won my age group of the first Notts. schools cycling proficiency competition. Still got the pennant and certificate somewhere.

Ah, but that was in the days when cyclists were expected to keep the highway laws like everyone else. I wonder whose bright idea it was to tell them they don't need to bother any more? The rules are there for everyone's safety. How on earth can it enhance our common welfare if we tell one group they don't need to bother any more? The same principle and woolly reasoning, applied to theft, would upset rather a lot of folk, I dare guess. It makes no more sense applied to cyclists.

Tell me, if you can, what sense it makes to tell cyclists that instead of waiting their turn at Traffic lights, they may either,

(a) simply ignore them and run the serious risk of colliding with a vehicle legally - legally, mark you - crossing their path - creating terrible unpleasantness, and giving the innocent driver they run across not merely the misery of police proceedings and the courts, a lifetime of misery, because s/he has been involved in an accident where a person was killed or seriously hurt.

Or (b) weave around all the vehicles waiting at the lights, and balance, wobbling, right under the wheels of the ones waiting to start off.

How does this improve our common safety or increase the sum of human happiness? Yet it is what cyclists do, daily, in our villages and towns and cities, to the hazard of everyone else, motorist and pedestrian alike. Yes, pedestrian. The other day I stopped at a Zebra to let some folk cross, only to be astonished as a cylist whizzed by on my left, and hurtled over the crossing, only narrowly missing the folk I had paused to allow over.

Frankly, the man who thought it up, deserves to be soundly whipped and put in the stocks where the public might let him know what most of us think, but which few, in these days of political correctness (or is that political cowardice?), dare to say for fear of being demonised.

In truth, I should very much like to see cyclists treated fairly.

Like the rest of us who use the roads, that is. I should like to see them have MOTs and insurance. I should like them to have to tax their machines, and get speeding fines. I should like to see their cycles removed when they cause obstructions, and have them prosecuted when they travel on the Queen's Highway without proper lights (and not those flashing LED things, which so far as I know are still illegal unless they are used at the same time as non-flashing cycle lights.

I know we all want to encourage folk to use cycles more. But please, let us encourage them to do it responsibly. If that was right to expect when I was a child, it is hard to see why it should no longer matter now. It is bad law. As I say, if today it is cyclists who can invent their own rules, who will be doing it tomorrow?