A modest request to HM Government: if we have to have an ‘active travel commissioner’ can we please make it a pedestrian next time, rather than an Olympic cyclist? In the past five years the number of fines issued by police forces to cyclists fell from 6,000 to 3,660. Some police forces last year failed to fine a single cyclist, while just ten were fined in the whole of Devon and Cornwall. But even this, apparently, is still too much for Chris Boardman, the current holder of the above post and a former gold medallist on his bike.
Mile for mile that they travel, cyclists are killing about half as many pedestrians as car-drivers
While acknowledging that cyclists ought to stop at red lights, he adds, in a letter to the Times, ‘We need to distinguish between behaviour that irritates us and behaviour that puts lives at greatest risk. Someone on a bike and someone driving a two tonne vehicle do not pose the same potential risk. That does not excuse either breaking the law, but it should inform where we put our limited enforcement resources.’
Sorry, but that sounds just a bit too much like a call to let cyclists off the hook. True, a two-tonne vehicle driven at 30 mph has a lot more momentum, and so a lot more potential to cause destruction, than a cyclist riding at 15 mph. But then two tonne vehicles don’t tend to be driven along the pavement; a space which cyclists increasing seem to think they are entitled to make their own.
Moreover, more and more are riding what are not really pedal cycles at all: they are, in effect, motorbikes. Their riders appear to think that they can ride wherever they like so long as they use an electric motor rather a petrol engine, and many police forces are completely unbothered by this.
In Cambridge, where I live, there is a long history of paths shared by cyclists and pedestrians. This didn’t matter so much when they were all push bikes, especially as serious cyclists preferred to use the road anyway. But it is becoming increasingly unpleasant to walk anywhere in the city now that Deliveroo riders on powerful and bulky e-bikes have decided that these paths belong to them. I have never once seen one challenged by the police.
A cyclist cutting up pedestrians on a footpath is more than an irritant. Between 2021 and 2025 seven pedestrians were killed in collisions with pedal cyclists and 53 in collisions with motorcycles; I don’t know into what category e-bikes, and especially illegally-modified ebikes, are put. Six cyclists, too, were killed in collisions with other cyclists. That is a lot lower than the 1,048 pedestrians and 203 cyclists killed in collisions with cars in the same period, but given that car and van journeys account for 76 per cent of miles travelled in 2024 and cycle journeys only 1 per cent, the relative dangers posed by cars and bikes is a lot less than you might think. Mile for mile that they travel, cyclists are killing about half as many pedestrians as car-drivers. They are killing around twice the number of their fellow cyclists as car-drivers do.
Cyclists moan bitterly about how they are treated by motorists, and not without good reason. But they then go out and treat pedestrians in the same was as car-drivers treat them, trying to bully them out of the way. By the way, contrary to Boardman’s bleating, police forces already are focusing their ‘enforcement resources’ heavily on motorists. In 2024, 2.54 million fines were issued to motorists (which doesn’t include all the bus lane fines and so on). Mile for mile, motorists are receiving over nine times as many fines as are cyclists. If we could increase the number of cyclists being fined in order to bring that closer to parity with motorists it would be a lot more pleasant to walk around our towns and cities.
