Chris Hoy hits out at “stupid” cyclists

I went on a couple of Critical Masses last year but found the sactimony a bit cloying. Half of the comments on this thread put me in the same frame of mind.

I went on a couple of Critical Masses last year but found the sactimony a bit cloying. Half of the comments on this thread put me in the same frame of mind.

I went on a couple of Critical Masses last year but found the sactimony a bit cloying. Half of the comments on this thread put me in the same frame of mind.

He might be a gold medal winning track cyclist but he should keep his mouth firmly closed when it comes to proselytising on road riding. But having said his bit there are a lot of twats who ride bikes doing all the things he whinges about, but there are also a lot of cyclists who don't who ride responsibly. Tarring us all with the same bad brush is just ignorant. Very disappointed that he's given up the world of cycling only to join that of motorsport.

I totally agree that cyclists should not do stupid things.

BUT: Why limit it to cyclists?

I'd go one further and say that PEOPLE should not do stupid things.

I hope Sir Chris extends his anti-stupidity policy to anyone he sees, in any environment, doing anything remotely stupid.

Then the world will be all sunshine and rainbows.

Or perhaps......
in my experience genuinely stupid people,
are often

too STUPID

to listen.

I was doing something similar like this today... moving from side to side and even going up on the curb and just missing car ..or them missing me ... what was i doing trying to miss all the potholes ... its a pity we don't here more of the top cyclists voices advocating a big change to our roads ... sorry Chris probably never seen me... but he might have seen the roads

Chris Hoy is something of a role model and a very, very experienced cyclist. Some may be surprised to know that even track sprinters do an awful lot of cycling on roads as well as on the velodrome.

As a role model, internationally known cyclist he has quite rightly spoken about the thing on which he is most expert i.e. cycling.

He has every right to criticise bad cycling and if he chooses to do he has a right to criticise bad driving - but he doesn't have a duty to do so.

Perhaps if he becomes a successful racing driver he may then be an influential role model for drivers and maybe then it would be appropriate for him to speak out about that to his followers. But again there is no duty to do so.

I, like Chris Hoy, get heartily fed up of people defending bad cycling. I do frequently criticise both bad cycling and bad driving because I have a right to do so. None of us however has a right to break the law by bad cycling or driving and whatever your excuse it doesn't excuse the behaviour.

Quote:

Just because many (or most) motorists disobey the laws, it does not make it right for us to do the same. We should earn the respect from motorists. Yes, I know....we may never gain the respect of many of them, but we have to make ourselves better than they are.

...and I'll say it again, I don't see anyone here suggesting that cyclists should be allowed to break the law. How simply can this be stated? Demanding the right to a safe road environment does not mean condoning dangerous cycling.
I was wearing hi-viz, a helmet and sporting full lights while cycling on an official cycle path that was completely segregated from the road (not a cycle lane). A motorist knocked me off my bike. If you follow the logic of some of the arguments on here, it appears I should just expect that sort of thing until bad cyclists have reformed and earned "us" more respect.
Cyclists are not the problem. Stop apologising and demand better.

I don't believe that rules are there for the breaking but I do advocate a degree of common sense to cycling behaviour, applying the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law. In that regard, I don't see anything wrong with cautiously filtering across junctions, using pavements or anything else on a bicycle if it is done in the same way that you'd do it on foot i.e. carefully and with due consideration to other road users and pedestrians.

The term 'Jumping Red Lights' infuriates me especially when pedantry motorists think cyclists are really 'road vehicles that don't pay road tax' rather than 'pedestrians on two wheels'. I don't suggest we teach our kids to ride irresponsibly on cycling proficiency courses but a degree of perspective wouldn't go amiss.

I appreciate Hoy's position but is he going to lose his rag whenever he sees a car pull into a cyclists priority zone or encroach into a cycle lane or any other multitude of minor road traffic annoyances that motor vehicle drivers perpetrate every single day? I doubt it.

"Chris Hoy has emerged as one of Britain’s most vocal advocates for cycling"

Really? I think the Chris who has emerged as one of Britain’s most vocal advocates for cycling must surely be Boardman. There must be ten really sound things he has said reported here for every utterance from Sir CH. I don't think CB wants to go away and drive inappropriate motor cars either.

Oh for goodness sake, stop trying to stick up for bad cyclists, just because they are cyclists! There are far too many comments on here that are moaning that Sir Hoy had the audacity to citicise a cyclists and then talk to the press about it.

It's about time people on here got to grips with the fact that not all cyclists obey the rules of the road - and before you scream about car/lorry/tractor/invalid carriage/pony & trap drivers doing the same - we all know about them, I've been hit by a car and got quite seriously injured, bike written off in a not my fault RTC. But this isn't about car drivers, heaven knows there is enough moaning about them on cycle forums the world over.

This is about cyclists, doing bad things when out riding, jumping red lights, riding on the pavement (if it's not a cycleway) and other anti-social stuff. We'd be screaming our heads off at a car driver doing the same! Time to learn that we're not perfect and we could do with taking this advice.

All the good work done by 99.9% of cyclists can be undone by 1 idiot behaving badly. It can send out all the wrong signals and make more anti-cycling drivers.

Just because they are a cyclist don't mean they are right!

My riding style factors in the motorists that don't pay attention or give a f**k. I'm not out there riding like an arse but in general i cycle how i feel most safe. If i need to get up on pavement or run a red i'll do it to stay out of trouble or to let traffic get by etc.

I won't agree with everything said in a lot of the comments above. But I'm a bit saddened by Chris Hoy's comments. I've been a cyclist since 1973 when I joined a club. I have also been a professional driver most of my working life.

Actually I'll take it out of cycling and road use. Let's just talk about people you walk past in the street. Do they have to earn respect to get common courtesy? I think not they should get respect as a default. They might individually lose it by their own actions. But you should respect people on face value and work from there.

As a motorist I don't jave to earn anyone's respect. I give courtesy to other road users a matter of course.

Why is that different when I'm a cyclist?

Chris is just a young lad so maybe he just hasn't thought this through. I'm sure his mum will set him straight.

There are people that are arseholes. But people in general should be respected. There are drivers that are at arseholes but drivers in general should be respected and there are cyclists that are arseholes but cyckists in general need vto be respected.

Default = respect for all road users.

Chris. Have another chat with your mum.

Am caught in two minds here. Possibly three or four.

Answer being better and more training, and better and more enforcement of traffic laws. For both cyclists and drivers. Oh, and a sane and sustainable transport infrastructure - legal, physical and political. Not possible to sustain that level of optimism for long without more drugs than the 1985 Tour De France peloton, but I'm going with it anyway.

So I don't feel left out, you may assume seventeen random swearwords here. I include roflcopter and twatwaffle as at least two of them.

Cyclists have a role to play in running a smooth, efficient, comfortable and predictable transport system. Motorists have a role to play in doing the same, whilst not killing and maiming anybody in the process.

Clearly the consequences of the cyclist not performing their role are significantly less important than the motorist not performing theirs, but the cyclist's role is not devoid of importance all together; they're still an integral part of the vast transport web.

Just because one's actions don't kill someone doesn't make them entirely excusable. But neither should they be treated, or brought up as key issues in matters of life and death if they are not relevant.

Rather than fumbling around with vague words like 'respect', it'd be better if the traffic laws everyone is grumbling about could simply be enforced by an unrelated, official third party. For example, by the Police, maybe. This is a matter of law and enforcement, not an matter of morals*. And until we design bad/lethal road user behaviour out of the transport network system entirely, enforcing the law properly remains the only (makeshift) solution I can see.

If there's one thing we can probably all agree on, it's that getting angry at each other on an internet forum is unlikely to change anything significant out in the wider world.

*not ones that can be meaningfully affected by spats on internet forums, in pubs, newspapers or anywhere else.

Does Hoy go out in his racing car and chase down drivers who run red lights/speed/drink drive/kerb crawl/hit and run/drive unroadworthy vehicles/drive whilst phoning-texting-reading-eating-fiddling with satnavs-shouting at kids on back seat instead of looking where they are going or is it very much only cyclists he sees as deserving of his chasing after and lecturing?

You have to earn not being killed?

Chris is a medal-winning sportsman, great, but he's quite a conservative guy, framing the debate in his Edinburgh circa 1983 way, might not know much about European infrastructure others are pushing for. He's out of his depth, makes Boardman look pretty smooth.

He could do worse than read an hour or two of http://www.copenhagenize.com/

Glad to hear that Sir Chris is a responsible cyclist. I understand his feelings and share the sentiment, but I'll be surprised if his approach of shaming idiot riders has much beneficial effect. Shouted advice rarely does.

Deleted comments...how bizarre.

I'll say it again then...go build your own race track / circuit and whinge there mr I'm a race car driver now.

After reading the comments on here there are lot of genuinely good ones but as always the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" cyclists are in abundance which is a shame.

Things Not To Bring Up At Cyclist Dinners:

Helmets
Hi-Viz
Red Lights
Use Of Dual-Carriageway A-Roads
Urination In Public Places

...and now:

Collective Responsibility And Punishment

(I really should do a website on this)

Excellent response here: http://helenblackman.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/chris-hoy-cycling-and-the-...

It seems one famous cyclist named Chris "gets it"... but the other doesn't.

The last time I checked, cyclists are humans, just like motorists. Compared to a car, the human on a bike will always be in the worse position. Many idiot humans in cars disregard the life of a human on a bike (I was nearly taken out three times on one 28 mile ride).

After a while you start to realise that sticking to the rules will not protect you. You can just as easily end up dead obeying the law as you can breaking it.

Respect is earned is it? What a stupid thing to say. So by that logic, the driver who knocks someone off his bike is justified because another cyclist jumped a red light, after all, they're all the same right?

A traffic system should not rely on respect.

When you're driving and you let another car in and receive no wave of thanks isn't it annoying? Plenty of cyclists ride as if they're alone on the road. Motorists think that either we're too arrogant to acknowledge they're there or we are too dozy to realise they're there.

- Single out on busy roads,
- Give a wave of thanks when someone waits to overtake safely
- When filtering to the front of a long queue of 'masters of the road' give the first driver a little smile and a friendly wave to thank him/her for their patience and to encourage them not to leave your husband/ wife a widower/widow.

I've found 90% of drivers respond favourably to this approach and it leaves them with the idea that they've shared. The other 10% are either senile or sociopaths and no amount of friendly cycling will change their behaviour.

Be firm. Be polite. Own the road. Smile and wave.

It's getting through slowly.

Oh, and when you pass horse riders on your bike remember to raise your fist in the Black Panther salute and say 'Riders of the Road Unite!' in a Wolfie Smith manner.