Bristol Drivers: always giving cyclists a hand

There are always complaints in the cycling community (all eight of them) about some war-on-cyclists taking place in Bristol. We know that's untrue: the war being conducted in Bristol is by cyclists, against Motorists!

Innocent motorists, we may add —law abiding, invariably polite and considerate.

Here we one such example, a BMW driver going out of their way to give the cyclist a helping hand up the road



See how they swerved to make sure they were able to help the cyclist? See how they carefully reached out and gently tried to assist the cyclist? Admittedly, they were try to help the cyclist fall over and injure themselves —but they were still trying to do their bit for a cycling city.

We've said before, that Bristol is split between those who like cycling and those who, well, hate it.



We suspect the driver of BMW MX64JWU may have been one of the people in the survey who expressed negative opinions about cycling. We may also suspect they aren't in favour of 20 mph limits.

Well, we always value those prepared to stand up for their principals, or here, lean out the window and try to push someone over for those same principals. We feel this driver should be congratulated with the publicity their action deserves. Does anyone know who they are?

Location: Horfield/Lockleaze border, Wordsworth Road.; that bit which the #24 bus covers.

Video from Dave Edmonds. See the BCyC facebook posting.

Bristol your Bristol

A reader, one of those tax dodging cyclists, emails us:

"As I write, highly civilised people are pulling their buses into the lanes occupied my bicycle, trying to kill me

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in running me over with a bus, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving FirstBus, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

Well, that's right. He is trying to kill you. He is engaging, as Chris Hutt puts it, in "anti-terrorist activities". It is everyone's duty to fight the war on bicycles. It's for your own good. Now put the bike down and start saving up for a car.

When George Orwell wrote the essay that has been misquoted above, he was trying to define what Englishness was: cups of tea, "old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning ", etc. No mention of bicycles. They are a foreign invention. Possibly even Scottish. No, what Orwell celebrated included "the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road", windy country roads, and the motor car. Admittedly he wrote it at a time petrol was being rationed, and if you did have any it would be for an Austin Morris vehicle whose quality control issues were a warning sign of the break down of the British factory system, a precursor to the economic problems this country has today. You could go out on your vehicle for a spin round the lanes, but you wouldn't know if you would get back.

Times have changed.


In the 1940s, a trip by car would have been an unusual event, the breakdown an adventure. Nowadays, its how you pick the kids up, the breakdown a crisis if it happens at 15:00 on the first day of school. You need help, you need an organisation that cares about you. Hence, the AA, here seen double parked on Whiteladies road as part of such a support call.

According to Wikipedia, the AA was founded in 1905 by a collection of motorists who wished to build a list of where speed traps were. This shows that the nanny state has been interfering with our rights for over a century -and that the AA has been standing up for them.

This week, the AA are pushing out a report, warning that the recession is threatening what it means to be be British.

Increased costs of motoring means that drivers are looking at ways of making motoring more efficient., This means we are more likely to question if we need to go to that meeting, can we avoid rush hour by going to work earlier or staying late, can the kids walk to school?

 The AA's president Edmund King said

"The motor vehicle is an integral part of British culture we rely on - whether getting to work, taking the kids to school or delivering goods. So when times are hard it is with reluctance we look at ways of cutting down on car journeys."

The report brought the shocking news that not only are some people walking and cycling to work, the increased cost of driving is encouraging people to work from home, or even to postpone their journey times to avoid peak hours. Some people have discovered that the unfair tax regime in the country now means that it is cheaper to walk your children to school.

The AA were quick to condemn this, and understand that people look at these options with reluctance. Being stuck in a traffic jam on the M32 is what defines us, and it brings in money for the government and the phone companies. If we did not spend an hour a day stuck on the M32 flyover, we wouldn't be funding the government. Or the AA.

Working from home, walking the kids to school, the AA are right to demand the government acts to stop these. Orwell's dream of a maid walking to communion has been replaced by the Honda CR-V sounding their horn at the bike in the way while the kids in the back argue over which DVD to watch. This is the dream of Britain that Cycling City is losing touch with. We must all support the AA in their campaign to focus on the real problems of the country: roads that aren't wide enough, and not get distracted by other issues, like the fact that we have got the next decade's governments forced to introduce scathing cuts to all government services through a year's worth of printing money and nationalising banks with a bigger exposure than our entire annual Gross Domestic Product.

If we do not fight the bicycles, we lose what it is to be British. We will be Dutch, or worse, Scandinavian.

Two Wheeled Terrorists: official

There is a new paper out which argues, according to the Daily Telegraph, that Cyclists killed more people than the 7/7 bombers, on account of people switching from the tube/bus to bicycle. We were a bit doubtful about this, the null hypothesis being that the Telegraph reporter had made everything up, but no, it turns out that the alternate hypothesis, "the researcher made everything up" is in fact the correct one. As the paper author says to Moving Target, "cycling has been a greater hazard than terrorism and is responsible for far more deaths."

Reading the paper, it is clear that the author has confused correlated with causated (i.e. there may be other causes of any increase in cycling deaths/injuries than an increase in numbers; Olympic construction springs to mind), and relies on the same weak measurement of cycling traffic as everyone else does -some samplings of a few main roads that nobody rational cycles down. And as it doesn't take any health benefits into account, overestimates the damage of cycling. That is, technically, it's bollocks. But from the researcher's perspectivel it does achieve one wonderful goal: it gets read, it gets cited, they get more funding.

Discounting the "cyclists cause more deaths than terrorists" hypothesis as being invalid, we do note something that the author missed, namely that cyclists hold up tax payers, and if there were more cyclists on the road after 7/7, more of us tax payers got held up by bicycles. That is, the cyclists will have cost the country far more in car commuter hours than the 7/7 TfL shutdown ever did.

And that is where we think, unarguably, you can say that bicycles are a greater threat to Britain than the 7/7 bombers. Really. Yes, some insane idiots blew up a bus and some tube trains. But it was a bus, not a decent car, like a Mercedes. And it was in London. Whereas bicycles, they irritate everyone across every city in Britain. They are out there, every day, getting in the way, slowing us down, creating congestion where before there was none.

When will one party stand up and recognise these people for threatening our very way of life; our dream of a quiet commute in from the suburbs to our jobs in the financial services back offices, day in day out. Not just slowing us down, but stressing us out, getting us angry, shortening our very lives!

In this city, the council has sold us out. Only the conservative party is fighting the bicycle terrorists, and they aren't doing a good job of it.

There are three groups of people out there doing their best: the bus companies (FirstBus and Turner Bus), the taxi and minicabs, and the Clifton Downs committee. The bus and taxi people have to do it discretely, punishing each bike they see by cutting them up, by going past really close, by blocking the ASL -so that eventually the cyclists will see what we are trying to tell them -that cycling is dangerous and that they should stop it.

The Clifton Downs committee, they ban bicycles, especially kids bikes, to stop them getting addicted to this class-A drug and then going on to the roads when they get bigger.

But look, here we have one of these subversives standing on the grass, right next to a no-cycling sign -there it is, on the path, between the Mercedes WR08CPY and the double yellow lines.  And he's ignoring it. He's laughing at the sign as if it is some kind of joke.

It is not - the Clifton Downs committee are standing up to bicycles, the greatest threat our country faces.  Now we have the peer-reviewed literature to back up our claims.

Stop these pavement criminals now

Here is the pavement cycling criminal Ryan Leech showing how, when cycling round Prague, he doesn't pay attention to rules about where bikes aren't allowed.

This shows precisely why the Evening Post's campaign against bicycles is so important. Imagine if Bristol became well known as a cycling city, people would come here to do things like this, to make videos of it, and encourage more people with bicycles to visit the city. It is simply unacceptable.