[TheSpectator-archive] Cyclists. I’ve become a tolerant cove in my old age but if there’s one word certain to raise my dander, it’s cyclists. In Brighton they think they own the place, enabled by successive stupid councils, who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on cycle lanes and those eyesore e-bikes all over town. With a murderous version of droit de seigneur — at odds with their right-on, self-righteous self-image — cyclists appear to believe that walkers are a lower order who they are free to run over as they please.
Cyclists in Brighton seem particularly fond of riding on pavements, where the most damage can be done. It’s like they see pedestrians as targets in some sort of video game — ten points for a man, 20 for a woman, 50 for a child. And it’s not just Brighton; London sounds a pedestrian’s nightmare. I asked around on Facebook and got nearly two hundred horror stories in a few hours:
Personally, I'd have a hunting season for cyclists.
I’ve found that people who support green politics are slightly nastier than others in their everyday life, feeling that they had ticked the nice box and therefore somehow won the right to be nasty. When I was a volunteer at a blind home a while ago, I’d regularly take a couple of sightless ladies out for a walk; we’d set out along the bustling main streets of our city, one on each arm, only for me to have to shove them roughly into the nearest doorway as some hulking brute drove a bike at us right there on the pavement. |