CHAPTER 8
The Outgroup: Why Cyclists Are Hated
Of Scorchers and Outgroups
A letter writer to the Times newspaper in London had very definite ideas about cyclists. “It is the practice of a number of them, spread out across the road, to rush down at headlong speed, more like a horde,” they wrote. “Woe betide the luckless man or aught else coming in their way.”1 The sentiments might be very modern, but as you can possibly guess from the language this was not a recent letter. It was, in fact, published in 1892, as complaints about overfast cyclists—popularly known as “scorchers”—became increasingly common in the press.
Such was the extent of the anticyclist feeling, little more than a decade after their mode of transport was invented, that some writers felt a need to hit back. In 1896, the English popular satirical magazine Punch carried a mocking riposte titled “New Rules for Cyclists.” Each bike rider is “presumed in all legal proceedings to be a reckless idiot, and on the wrong side of the road, unless he can bring conclusive evidence to the contrary,” read one supposed diktat. Another jokingly decreed that if a cyclist saw another vehicle or a pedestrian approach on the road, they should “instantly dismount, run the machine into the nearest ditch, and kneel in a humble and supplicating attitude till said horse, cart, etc., has got at least a mile away.”2
If the tone at all feels oddly familiar to readers in places like the UK, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, that’s because in some places the public discourse about cycling seems barely to have advanced in the last 120 or so years, except for “scorcher” being replaced by “Lycra lout,” “spandex warrior,” or another variant. Ride a bike in many cities, and it can feel like you’re the unelected local representative of some mistrusted, barely understood cult. I occasionally experience this from work colleagues, relatives, and friends. Sometimes the questions are based around curiosity (“So, why do you all wear such funny clothes?”), or can be more openly hostile (“Why do you all run red lights?”). It’s what I imagine it must be like being a Mormon or a Scientologist.
Why does it still happen? The most straightforward answer is that in places where such attitudes prevail, cyclists do tend to be a small minority, often not vastly more numerous than, say, Mormons. But there is more to it. There is strong evidence that cyclists are treated like what psychologists like to call an “outgroup.”
In the simplest terms, an outgroup is the “them” in a “them and us” scenario. Human beings inevitably seek association with others, for all sorts of reasons. The unfortunate corollary of this instinct is the desire to exclude those who don’t fit in. “It can be any situation in which some group or category difference comes to the fore in people’s lives,” says Rupert Brown, professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex. “It can work two ways—taxi drivers might think all cyclists jump lights, while cyclists in turn think taxis are badly driven. It’s a relativist thing. It depends on your own vantage point.”3
Outgroups tend to feel most beleaguered when they are numerically small, and are scapegoated or stigmatized by a significantly larger or more powerful section of society. The most traditional and pernicious variant of this is, of course, things like race, nationality, religion, or culture. But it can also be applied to incredibly heterogeneous groups with nothing more in common than, for example, that they happen to ride a bike as one of their ways of getting around.
Some academics who have studied attitudes to cycling believe it suffers in such a way. “Definitely. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot,” says Dr. Ian Walker, the British psychologist whose many studies about the way drivers treat cyclists we saw in chapter 7. “What you see in discourses about cycling is just the absolute classic nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies social psychology of prejudice,” he explains. “It’s exactly those things that used to be done about minority ethnic groups and so on—the overgeneralization of negative traits, underrepresentation of negative behaviors by one’s own group, that kind of thing. It’s just textbook prejudiced behavior. It’s not so much the number of people. It’s to do with power. In this case it refers to power to own the street, as it were.”4
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This modern power relationship between cyclists and society is not a straightforward interaction. In places like Britain and elsewhere, the lack of a culture of everyday cycling means a disproportionate number of people who do use bikes tend to be enthusiasts, often male, and sometimes riding relatively expensive machines. Thus, some of this mocked and despised group, in other areas of their life, might actually be relatively privileged and powerful.
In 2013, The Economist, the weekly bible of the management classes, ran a completely serious article calling road cycling “the new golf,” identifying it as the best way for businesspeople to network with one another.5 A couple of years earlier a leading market research firm, Mintel, published a study noting that the modern British cyclist is disproportionately likely to have an above-average household income.6 In some ways these people are the spiritual descendants of the Victorian “scorchers,” hobbyists for whom a bike is often a choice rather than necessity. There are still plenty of people who cycle only because it’s convenient, or they can’t afford a car. But it is not these who are stereotyped in the media as the default for every cyclist.
Rachel Aldred, the Westminster University transport expert we heard from in earlier chapters, argues that in some of the scorn for cycling comes from this characterization of it being somehow frivolous—unlike the serious, adult business of driving a car. “It’s as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing on the roads, almost like you’re playing in the street and getting in the way of the traffic, like you’re a child,” she says. “There’s also this dual way you can be stigmatized as a cyclist—it was historically seen as something for people with no choice, but now it’s seen as something for people who have a choice. It’s a leisure or play thing that they shouldn’t be doing in this inappropriate place.”7
Does any of this really matter? Can’t cyclists, especially the middle-class, above-average-income-earning ones, just shrug it off? To an extent many do. But there is a problem: the moment anyone is obliged to ride a bike on a busy road, the power balance tilts alarmingly. Those nineteenth-century cyclists faced a relatively equal traffic environment of pedestrians and carts. Their modern successors are still just flesh, blood, and bones, but now matched against people inside speeding metal cages.
This is why the cyclist-as-outgroup idea is so harmful. The media clichés inform a wider narrative in bars, in offices, and on the Internet. This in turn infects the sentiments of politicians who, seeing cyclists as despised and mocked, are less likely to risk implementing pro-cycling initiatives. Finally, there is evidence that the way people view cycling can affect the way they actually drive. Studies have indicated that this outgroup status can prompt drivers to give people on bikes less space, or to automatically assume they are in the wrong. Very recent research even suggests, tentatively, that negative media coverage can bring an increase in anticyclist incidents on the road.
All of a sudden the subject feels a lot more serious.
They Want to Confiscate Our Road
To unpack the way cycling is too often portrayed in the media, let’s look at a 2015 editorial opinion column in the Staten Island Advance. I’ve got no particular wish to target this long-running publication, which has the honor of being the only remaining daily paper specific to a borough of New York City. But it’s illustrative, not so much for the opinion itself—an argument against plans to build more local bike lanes—but for the way it is expressed.
“Ardent bicyclists, we’ve found, have an evangelical zeal about their pursuit,” the op-ed begins. “For the most passionate of them, it’s not enough that they enjoy cycling; they insist that everyone must enjoy it.” This “fervor,” the paper says, has found “eager acolytes in government.”
Consider the language. Cyclists are “they,” against the paper’s—and, implicitly, the readers’—“we.” They are “evangelical.” They don’t have supporters in government, they have “acolytes.”
The column condemns the city government’s pro-bike policies: “So it is that bike lanes have been superimposed on street after street throughout the city, regardless of capacity or traffic conditions, as lane space for car and truck traffic is confiscated to allow the addition.”8 Again, it’s the language that is telling. Road space is “confiscated,” meaning it must have been owned, in this case by drivers.
The piece goes on for some time. Cycle advocates are “devotees,” “true believers,” “hard-core enthusiasts”; their ideas are “radical thinking.” Building more bike lanes is “wishful thinking” and “fantasy.” It’s the sort of language you’d expect to be used for a religious cult, not a group of people who’d just kind of like it if they and their friends and family were able to cycle around a bit more easily and safely. The subtext is fairly explicit: cyclists are both an “other” and a homogenous mass to which you can ascribe all sorts of shared characteristics.
I always find this latter element particularly baffling. Strictly speaking, a cyclist is just someone who chooses a bike as one of what is probably several means of transport, or forms of leisure. It is true that some people feel a more tribal affinity with cycling. They might read bike magazines, even hang around in bike shops chatting about tires and chain lube. But even those who approach the Staten Island Advance’s idea of a “devotee” will probably also watch TV, or perhaps play chess. They might babysit for nephews or nieces, enjoy superhero films, go out for meals or on vacation. And yet it’s only the one activity that is meant to define them.
These generalizations can creep into the utterances of people who would otherwise consider themselves impeccably liberal and inclusive. Take Linda Grant, a British writer who actually began her career as a journalist for my newspaper, The Guardian. Grant is learned, thoughtful, and award-winning. Along with novels, she has written a celebrated feminist history of the sexual revolution. And yet when it comes to cycling all those subtleties evaporate.
In late 2015, Grant wrote a column (again for The Guardian) that in part described the difficulties she faces, given her impaired eyesight, crossing London streets down which cyclists can sometimes zip at high speed. There are the beginnings of an interesting subject here. A few cyclists, as with all road users, can be reckless. While very rarely lethal, their behavior can be more intimidating than they maybe think, especially for more vulnerable pedestrians.
But Grant overlays this idea with a thick layer of hugely sweeping statements. Cyclists are, she notes, “the most morally pure of road users, the ethical standard-bearer for healthy living, a challenge to climate change.” There are exaggerations: “In a normal day of pedestrian road use I can repeatedly observe cyclists running red lights, and also coming up on to pavements scattering screaming passersby.” Grant stresses that not all cyclists are like this, but it’s a limited concession: “The percentage of arsehole cyclists may be a minority, but it’s a minority large enough to make crossing roads an exercise in guesswork.”9
This kind of language fascinates me. I like to speculate what sort of other hugely varied group to which Grant might ascribe common, unifying characteristics and failings. Vegetarians? Painters and decorators? She could perhaps write: “The percentage of arsehole great-aunts may be a minority, but it’s a minority large enough to make going to tea parties an exercise in guesswork.” Of course not. If she did, the response from readers would be in part anger, but also just bafflement.
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These are just two examples, and both of the milder variety. Much of the outgroup talk is more blatant. The Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney, Australia, has spent years consistently and repeatedly labeling cyclists as red-light runners and law breakers, and condemning any plans to make the roads more safe for them.
One of Britain’s most respected political columnists, Matthew Parris, once wrote a column in the Times titled, “What’s smug and deserves to be decapitated?” suggesting people should string piano wire across cycle paths. As we’ll see later, a few people actually do this. And yet the suggestion—later explained by Parris as a joke—was arguably among the less offensive parts of the article, which labeled cyclists as oddly dressed, self-righteous, impractical, badly mannered, angry, self-satisfied, and “insolent jerks.”10 The Spectator, a venerable British current affairs magazine, once devoted its cover story to a diatribe calling cyclists oversensitive law breakers who deliberately hold up traffic while wearing “pompous little pointy plastic hats.”11
In places where the outgrouping is most strong, such talk tends to coalesce around the modern-day folk devil known in the UK as the “MAMIL,” an acronym for “middle-aged man in Lycra.” This semimythical creature rides shiny and expensive road bikes, squeezing its white-collar belly into unflatteringly tight cycle clothes. Such people, the discussion goes, are not just weird-looking and antisocial, they’re also smug, self-righteous, and apt to moan like sissies every time a car passes within six feet.
Time and again, otherwise sensible and clever writers lapse into stereotypes and generalizations. All cyclists jump red lights, they wear funny clothes, they don’t pay for the highways. They ride in the middle of the road. They’re a menace to others, and to themselves. They’re them. They’re not us.
There Isn’t a War on the Roads
When I discuss this subject with someone, there generally comes a moment when they pause, look a bit awkward, and tell me: “Of course, these generalizations are bad. But cyclists do jump red lights a lot, don’t they?” My response to this is usually on the lines of: “You live in London. There are idiots everywhere. Why do you only notice the idiot cyclists?”
I don’t mean to excuse poor behavior by cyclists that, as I mentioned above, can be genuinely antisocial and intimidating. I don’t like cyclists running reds or bunny-hopping onto the sidewalk to weave between pedestrians. If you’re a healthy twenty- or thirtysomething trying to avoid such riders, they are an irritant. If you’re old and terrified of a fall, or walking with a small child, it can be deeply unnerving.
Some riders argue that ignoring traffic lights is the safest option amid a traffic system intrinsically biased against them. Personally I disagree. I think people mainly do it because it’s more convenient for them.
In fact, there is a good argument that the worst sorts of cyclists are quite likely to also be aggressive and risky when they drive a car. On a train they’re probably the sort to push past you to grab a seat. When flying they probably recline their seat all the way back the moment the meals are served. They are, to borrow Linda Grant’s word, arseholes. But unlike her I blame the person, not the mode of transport. These are multimodal arseholes.
The problem for cyclists is that their law-breaking is highly visible. It’s easy to tut as someone blithely cycles across a junction on red, but you might not have noticed all the motor traffic doing 40 mph–plus in a 30 mph zone, let alone the drivers glancing down to look at a phone screen on their lap. This sort of behavior is normalized, even though it’s statistically much, much more likely to kill or maim someone. This can sound like a plea on behalf of reckless cyclists. It’s not. It’s just a plea for proportion and for context.
Occasionally one of the people discussing cyclist law-breaking with me will suggest that miscreants should have their bikes immediately confiscated and melted down. Fine, I reply: just as long as the same rules apply to drivers. No scrapyard on Earth would be big enough for a single day’s haul from one of the main roads of London, New York, Paris, or Sydney, let alone Beijing or New Delhi.
A slight modification on the narrative is the idea that drivers and cyclists are engaged in a somehow equal battle for space and supremacy, often described as “a war on the roads.” This is silly for several reasons, not least that in many countries the majority of cyclists also drive, and so are supposedly at war with themselves. In reality, the idea is mainly used as an excuse to suggest onerous and pointless regulations for cyclists, on the supposed idea they are on a par with cars.
In 2015, the very cozy and respectable BBC radio consumer program “You and Yours” discussed whether cyclists should be obliged to take out third-party insurance, an idea inspired by an incident where a sidewalk-riding cyclist struck and slightly injured a young child.12 Chris Boardman, the Olympic cyclist who now campaigns for everyday cycling, was a participant in the program, and very politely pointed out how rare such events were.
Afterward, Boardman was considerably more blunt, telling me that the whole premise for the program was absurd. “When you put it into perspective, there are thirty-six people in the UK killed on sidewalks by cars, buses, and lorries every year—that’s just on sidewalks—versus about one every three years from a cyclist,” he said. “It’s ludicrous the program was even on. Nobody seems to feel obliged to look at any facts.”
Boardman is more scathing still about the idea of a “war” on the UK’s roads. “You’ve got two percent of vulnerable road users versus ninety-eight percent in two tons of steel,” he said. “How can you possibly have a war? I think that’s called a massacre.”13
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It’s impossible to gauge how much this affects politicians, the people with the actual power to improve life for cyclists. It’s fair to say that at either end of the political commitment scale it probably makes little difference. Michael Bloomberg had clearly decided by 2006 that his city needed its streets reshaped, and wasn’t about to let a few hostile headlines in the New York Daily News sway him. Equally, Toronto’s late and troubled former mayor Rob Ford had a seemingly more fundamental antipathy at work when he started digging up bike lanes, telling citizens that “roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks,” and if a cyclist was killed “it’s their own fault at the end of the day.”
My own theory is that the outgroup notion comes most into play for politicians who maybe feel they should do something for cycling, but don’t manage to treat the subject with sufficient seriousness. In part this is because, as a transport minister, commissioning a new rail line or airport is much more exciting than thinking about prosaic bike lanes and a few redesigned junctions. But I’m convinced that too many politicians just don’t see cycling as a necessity. For them it is an add-on, a sop to the enthusiasts, something to be squeezed onto a road if there’s a bit of spare space and spare cash left over from the main task of motor traffic. This, I fear, is where the outgroup notion can shape their thinking.
It might help explain why some otherwise sensible politicians, like their equivalents in the media, can start talking utter nonsense when they discuss cycling. Some of these are gaffes that, if said on a more mainstream subject, would see them ridiculed, even drummed from office.
At the time of writing, Robert Goodwill had spent several years as the British junior transport minister whose brief covers cycling, among other areas. Goodwill is a diligent politician who presents himself as the cyclists’ friend. When I interviewed him soon after he got the job he pointed proudly to the folded Brompton bike in the corner of his Westminster office, on which he dashed about London. And yet, when Goodwill was speaking to a parliamentary inquiry into cycling in May 2016 and was asked why relatively so few British women ride bikes, he gave an alarming response. There are several genuine and interconnected reasons for why this happens, almost all connected to poor bike infrastructure. Goodwill, however, breezily recollected how his wife had once told him she worried about getting “helmet hair” if she rode a bike.14 This is the man with ultimate responsibility for cycling in the UK. We should despair.
Amazingly this wasn’t even the silliest thing said by the person in Goodwill’s role. His predecessor, Norman Baker—also keen and intelligent, also occasionally clueless—was once being quizzed by MPs about cycling safety, and asked what lessons the UK had to learn from the Dutch. His answer wasn’t just alarming, it almost defied belief.
The statistics, Baker explained patiently, showed the Netherlands actually had a higher cycling casualty rate than the UK. “What we can learn from the Netherlands, in my view, is probably not safety issues, particularly,” he said with some smugness.15 MPs and members of the public scratched their heads. As we heard earlier, cycling in the Netherlands is generally seen as being three or four times safer than in the UK.
It transpired Baker was talking about cycling casualties per head of population, a measure which takes no account of the fact the average Dutch person cycles about ten times farther every year than their British peer. It was the sort of basic statistical error that would see a teenager mocked in a math class. Baker might as well have congratulated himself on the much lower British casualty rates connected to windmill repairs, speed skating, or tulip picking.
They’re Doing It Again
It is, however, to Australia, where we must go for the arguably best example of an overtly hostile media setting the tone for politicians. How bad are things there? Bad enough for a veteran bike campaigner to write a mock letter from a future government apologizing to cyclists for treating them so dreadfully.
Written by Omar Khalifa, formerly head of Bicycle New South Wales and now leader of a new cyclists’ political party, his letter from a hypothetical future state government echoed a recent apology by police to the organizers of the first gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, the New South Wales capital, in 1978. While Mardi Gras is now a much-celebrated part of the city’s cultural landscape, many of the first participants were arrested and beaten up. The parallel might sound extreme, but Khalifa argues it is relevant. “They’re doing it again,” he says. “They’re not bashing people, but they’re cracking down with harshness.”16
Khalifa was prompted to act by new laws introduced in New South Wales state in March 2016, which immediately increased fines for offenses such as not wearing a helmet or riding dangerously up to sixfold, pushing some to 425 Australian dollars (about $310 USD), and also set a date in 2017 for riders to carry obligatory photo ID.
The regime was devised by the state’s roads minister, Duncan Gay, a man who once proudly described himself as the government’s “biggest bike lane skeptic,” and who had previously proposed the idea that cyclists should be registered and licensed. This was dropped after civil servants pointed out it would be almost impossible to implement, would bring no real benefits, and would be likely to put a lot of people off cycling.17
In its place came the new fines, along with a concessionary move to oblige drivers to give cyclists at least a meter of space (around three feet) when overtaking, rising to one and a half meters (closer to five feet) if passing at more than about 40 mph.
Sensible enough stuff, surely, to encourage all groups on the road to behave better? It’s not so simple. Treating cyclists as a problem to be regulated into submission simply ends up meaning fewer people ride bikes. Even before the new fines, an onerous regulatory system underpinned by compulsory helmet laws introduced in 1991 has kept cycling levels in the state pathetically low, at around 2 percent of all trips. It could be much more, especially in Sydney. The city is spread out and hilly in places, but it has obliging weather and a lot of inner suburbs in easy riding distance of the center.
I spent a gloriously happy couple of years there as a bike messenger, enduring a couple of earlier police crackdowns on cyclists. The most memorable and most ludicrous saw an unhappy contingent of officers sent out on bikes to pose as couriers, an undercover role not helped by their middle age and bulging waistlines. I once saw a member of this squad chase a colleague of mine up a hill in the city center, yelling for him to stop. The colleague, among the top ten amateur road bike racers in the state, was so unfailingly polite he would surely have stopped if only the policeman had gotten close enough to be audible.
Some elements of the city’s bike culture have improved since then, mainly thanks to Clover Moore, Sydney’s mayor since 2004. She is keen to see more cycling and has built some separated lanes. But her powers are limited, and Gay and his state government seem determined to block her at every turn. They are egged on by a media obsessed with the supposed need to tackle dangerous, law-breaking riders, with phrases like “speed demons” and “reckless cyclists” common. The city’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, in particular, seems obsessed with the subject.
Moore describes the overall effect as “toxic.” She told me: “I’ve had daily attacks in that newspaper over the years. But it’s not just the Daily Telegraph. We committed to a two-hundred-kilometer cycle lane network in Sydney, and some people considered this an absolute revolution. I had television cameramen based outside my house to film me. I was so outrageously attacked from the start.”18
Traffic laws and the policing of them are a matter for the state, and some Sydney cycling advocates say the new fines and the zealous and varied way in which they are enforced are making cyclists feel less welcome than ever. One of the $425 fines is for dangerous riding, something local police appear to interpret as they choose. One early receiver was stationary at a red light but track standing, where you keep the bike balanced but motionless while on the pedals. Other riders have been stopped by officers and warned they could be fined just for cycling on busy roads.
Khalifa believes Gay’s overall tone makes cycling even more marginalized, and thus more risky. “He’s resonated with those people in the community who see cyclists in front of them as being an obstacle,” Khalifa says. “It becomes a venting of frustration.”
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Gay himself doesn’t tend to talk much in public about cycling, perhaps because when he does he occasionally says some very odd things. During a 2014 TV interview he was asked whether it worried him that helmet compulsion could put some people off cycling. Not a bit of it, Gay responded. If people who don’t like helmets don’t cycle at all, that would definitely keep them safe, he said, adding with the grin of a man who believes he’s clinched an argument: “I’ve saved their life.”19
At the time, Gay was pondering the cycle registration scheme, something he justified on the supposed basis of cyclists needing to be protected from their own risky behavior. “We need to change the actions and the habits,” Gay said. “If we have a system of rules that people know can be enforced, they will think about what they do on a particular day.”
I asked Gay’s department several times if I could interview him but was rebuffed. I was instead granted a long chat with Bernard Carlon, head of road safety in the state. As an official rather than a politician, it is Carlon’s job to come up with evidence to support the minister’s decisions, and I’m far from convinced he’s done so. I asked Carlon several times why, if helmet use was the key, countries like the Netherlands had far better safety rates for cycling and almost no helmets. He replied that Australia’s road environment and “culture of cycling” are very different.
What Carlon sees as the main argument for tougher enforcement measures is the fact that data from health authorities shows that 30 percent of cyclist injuries in New South Wales don’t involve another vehicle, but instead a rider falling after hitting a curb or pole. The inference is that cyclists are riding in a risky and reckless manner, and must be somehow reined in through huge fines and compulsory ID checks. If you were Dutch or Danish, you might instead begin by looking at the infrastructure on which all these cyclists keep crashing. But then if you were Dutch or Danish, you wouldn’t have a media telling you every day that cyclists are a feral subsection who need taming.
Omar Khalifa is among those convinced that the way cyclists are written and talked about has a direct influence on the laws they face. “As an advocate I’ve too often heard, ‘It’s you guys, you cyclists,’” he says. “Imagine turning it around and saying, ‘You motorists,’ because you saw someone go through a red light. That would be inconceivable. But when you’re a minority group you tend to take all the bigotry, and tend to be classified as a group, and it’s therefore justified doing anything you want to all of them.”
Sabotage
It is not only Australia. Ian Walker is among those who believe the UK also sees a connection between the way cyclists are discussed and the occasionally reckless way people act toward them. “I’d be very surprised if that’s not happening,” he says. “It is acceptable to sit in a pub and say things like, ‘Bloody cyclists, we should run them off the road,’ or to write things that are, literally, calling for murder. You can’t do that with other groups. Firstly, the fact it’s acceptable to get away with that, and people aren’t castigated for saying and writing these things, tells you a lot about where we stand. And it would be incredibly surprising if the fact that people are saying and writing these things doesn’t then shape perception of how normal an act it is.”20
One of the most comprehensive studies about the social status of cyclists was carried out in 2002 by Britain’s respected Transport Research Laboratory.21 The researchers spoke in depth to dozens of drivers of varying types during focus groups. Those interviewed often displayed stereotypical outgroup opinions of cyclists, who were seen as low status (this was shortly before the MAMIL phenomenon emerged) and also unpredictable.
Many drivers were puzzled why cyclists “didn’t pay for the roads.” Commonly used words included “irresponsible,” “despised,” “erratic,” and “arrogant.” This wasn’t constant—drivers who also cycled and, to a lesser extent, women were inclined to be more sympathetic. But such negative opinion seemed prevalent.
There was more to it. As part of the study, the drivers were shown videos of various interactions between vehicles and cyclists on the road, including cars pulling out in front of bikes or turning across them. The research found that, even when a driver was clearly to blame, the focus groups tended to criticize the cyclist, seeing fault as innate to their status.
“The respondents’ comments indicated that they thought the cyclist’s actions were inherent and dispositional behaviors,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, the motorists’ misdemeanors were excused or justified in terms of the situational influences.”
Crucially, while the drivers were at pains to insist that they themselves were always patient and careful with cyclists, they predicted that other drivers would be notably less so. This is what’s known as “norm positioning,” a psychology term that explains people’s tendency to describe the habitual behavior of others with some accuracy while unconsciously boosting their self-esteem by saying, with less honesty, that they would, of course, behave far better themselves.
The report’s conclusions are phrased in slightly blank academic language, but the implications are nonetheless chilling: “An important point following from this analysis is that it seems unlikely that drivers’ own behavior actually is as cautious as they claimed it to be, since the norm positioning effect entails adoption of a somewhat artificial stance. In other words, the true ‘social norm’ for behavior around cyclists is probably less tolerant and less cautious.”
So, bias against cyclists means drivers who hold such views are inclined to give bikes less time, space, and patience on the roads than they should to properly protect such a desperately unprotected and vulnerable road user. But why? The authors argue that as well as seeing cyclists as an outgroup, drivers feel a “strong obligation” to other members of their motor-powered ingroup to not delay them, even if that means passing a cyclist recklessly. All this is pretty depressing, but of little surprise for someone who has cycled regularly in the UK, or somewhere else with a similar bike culture.
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Sometimes the hatred of cyclists as a group can be expressed much more explicitly. In June 2015, Alec James was taking part in an organized ninety-mile mass bike event on closed roads through countryside in South Wales. But his day ended early. “I was about thirty miles in, on a fast downhill stretch, and I saw one rider on my left go down,” James says. “I moved to avoid him and started to slow. Then my front tire blew out and I went over. I rolled with the bike for a good few yards, bashed my head, breaking the helmet. I was doing about 30 mph. I got deep lacerations on my leg. I couldn’t walk properly for a week.”22 When he got to his feet, to find a pedal-shaped chunk taken out of his thigh, James saw the crash had been caused by dozens of tacks deliberately spread across the road.
A couple of weeks earlier, several riders taking part in a race on the back roads of Surrey, to the south of London, suffered punctures after tacks were scattered. That no one was hurt was mainly down to luck, says Adrian Webb, chairman of the cycling club involved: “You can guess how dangerous it can be if you have an eighty-man peloton and someone punctures unexpectedly. These guys have got slick tires pumped up very strongly for a race—there’s every chance a tire can explode. If a rider comes off, there could be a mass pileup.”23 Such tactics seem peculiarly common in the UK, which has also seen a spate in recent years of wire strung along off-road bike tracks, something also seen on a few US trails.
Not everyone agrees that such actions are connected to negative coverage of cyclists. “There are about 250,000 assaults on the streets a year,” Chris Boardman says of the UK. “If we’re going to accuse other people of taking things out of context, we need to not do that. There are always going to be idiots and people who are evil or just plain stupid.” Others disagree. Mark Strong, a cycling advocate in the English seaside city of Brighton, connects incidents there of wire strung across bike paths to the introduction of new cycle lanes by a Green-led council. “There is an element of legitimization toward dislike of cyclists from the attitudes of the press and politicians,” he says. “It’s almost an official endorsement to be anticyclist. And for everyone who thinks it’s now okay to shout at a cyclist, at the tip of the bell curve there will be somebody who think it’s okay to stretch wires across bike paths.”
One recent Australian academic study indicates that Strong might have a point. Research by the Accident Research Centre at Melbourne’s Monash University saw cyclists in Australian Capital Territory, a state with high bike use and also a significant number of road collisions involving cyclists, fitted with helmet-mounted video cameras and GPS data loggers.24
About 450 hours of footage was recorded during more than five thousand miles of commuting trips. While none of the participants was knocked off, the study recorded ninety-one “potential conflict events,” most commonly drivers turning across cyclists or car doors being opened in their path. As an aside, more than 90 percent of the incidents were found to be the driver’s fault, though you could argue this was skewed by the expectation that cyclists fitted with cameras for an experiment are less likely to be reckless.
Most relevant here is the interview stage of the study, where the cyclists described their experiences on the roads. A number of them told the academics that they noticed a definite increase in harassment from drivers following a high-profile and much-reported fuss when the retired Australian cricketer Shane Warne called for cyclists to be licensed after getting embroiled in an argument with one when driving his car.
One participant, a woman in her forties, said: “When we had the Shane Warne incident in Melbourne, for about two or three weeks I copped so much abuse on the road, but after that it’s toned down. So I think that [driver abuse] peaks with those incidents.”
A lot of the participants recalled a similar upsurge in aggression before the study, in 2009, after a popular Australian satire show, Good News Week, ran a skit in which two comedians discussed their frustrations with cyclists, and mimed opening a car door onto them. One cyclist in his fifties said he was harassed three times in a single commute a couple of days after the show was broadcast.
This is not forensic proof. This was a qualitative study involving thirty-six cyclists, and any connection was reported by them. But it’s potentially alarming stuff.
“What Is Something Annoying a Cyclist Might Do?”
One of the many oddities of the language and tone used against cyclists is how few other such disparate groups endure similar treatment, other than over issues such as religion or culture. Jokes about mothers-in-law and female drivers are largely of the past. Even Britain’s ferocious tabloid press has stopped referring to people with mental illness as “crazy” or “bonkers” following pressure from charities.
One British cycle campaigner, Mark Treasure, makes a fascinating if slightly contentious comparison between the tone taken toward cyclists and that taken in the 1970s and ’80s against people who followed football in England. While English football is now a glossy, corporate, multibillion-pound, TV-funded operation, in that earlier era fans tended to be working-class and, due to occasional violence at games, dismissed en masse as hooligans. The culmination of this process was the Hillsborough disaster, one of the worst civilian tragedies and longest-running injustices in recent British history. It took place in April 1989, when ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death after supporters were herded into a too-small, fenced area of a crumbling stadium. While this was primarily down to police blunders, officers made up stories about drunk, rampaging supporters. Despite a lack of any evidence, this became the official narrative and was not formally corrected until 2016.
Treasure notes that British cyclists are also labeled as law breakers, unworthy of proper treatment. “These attitudes and opinions are then used to legitimize claims that cyclists don’t deserve any kind of ‘special treatment’—i.e. cycling infrastructure—that would reduce risk of serious injury or death,” he writes. “The comfort and conditions of cyclists is regarded as moot.”25
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Let’s end with a very modern equivalent of our opening 1892 complaint about reckless scorchers. Rather than a letter to the Times, the medium was a TV quiz show, Family Feud, known to British audiences as Family Fortunes. For those who haven’t seen it, the program pitches two teams of families against each other to guess the most common answer to largely inconsequential questions put in advance to a panel of the public. This is the Australian edition, hosted by Grant Denyer, a toothsome and chipper figure who bounds around the set, beaming at everyone. Here, he grins more broadly still as a question comes up: “What is something annoying that a cyclist might do?”26
A wholesome-looking young woman from one of the competing families pushes the buzzer to give what proves the most-given answer: “Ride in your car lane.” Amid the appreciative applause there’s no explanation of what a “car lane” might be, and how it differs to an ordinary lane on the road.
Next, the opposing family takes over the guessing. “Cutting you off,” correctly guesses one young man. A relative tries her luck. “I’m a bit of a fashion person—they wear Lycra . . .” she begins, bringing a snort of laughter from Denyer. “Do you find that a little, um, offensive to the eyeball?” he asks, to understanding giggles from the audience.
The remaining answers as to why cyclists might be annoying are, in ascending order of popularity, “ringing the bell,” “riding slowly,” “pulling out in front,” “running red lights,” and “everything.” Each is treated as gently amusing, the unspoken subtext being that all the contestants drive cars, while cyclists are a slightly exotic and exasperating alien group.
Such limp humor might seem a long way from wires across paths, or even a road environment that only the most confident and assertive of riders feel they are able to brave. But the connection is there. Every complicit grin from Grant Denyer, each assertion from Duncan Gay that cyclists must be regulated into safety, op-eds in the Staten Island Advance describing roads “confiscated” from cars, Linda Grant’s decision to write a column about morally pure arseholes—it all adds up. Every one of these, I am convinced, places me, my loved ones, and anyone else on a bike, marginally yet incrementally in more danger every time we get onto a saddle. And that can’t be right.