'Anti-social’? Cambridge cyclists responsible for just seven out of 4,400 anti-social incidents

Spend some time in Cambridge and see what you think. As a pedestrian you have to be completely switched on..if not you'll be taken out or verbally abused at best.

The special case of cycling arouses anxiety in a lot of people. People complain and sometimes they even report things if a police officer is avalable. In practice however they do very little about them.

Contrast this with people's completely rational fear of motor vehicles. This fear makes them take inconvenient and uhealthy measures to keep themselves and their children well away from the roads where vehicles are a hazard and a source of real danger. What people do tells us much more about their genuine concerns than their grumbling.

Venting to a spare Police Officer about a stray cyclist feels like it's worth trying and that it's socially acceptable. Asking for a safe street for children to walk or cycle along on their way to school seems like asking for the moon. People do the first but neglect the second. Police officers and politically appointed office holders are, in this sense, just like everybody else. They see and feel the trivia and try to intervene. They know, at the deepest level, the danger elsewhere but they take it as an immutable fact of life and learn to live with it.

We live in a very disordered culture. See a very recent short tale about a cycle ride and a police officer from Bristol. over here

Are people really being terrified by bike riders? Seems pretty pathetic to me. Unlike cars, bikes have a relatively short stopping distance so if there's a pedestrian in their path a bike can brake relatively quickly and prevent an accident. I'd like to know the figure for how many people are getting killed or injured by being run into by a bike. It's probably worse off for the bike rider if they crash into a pedestrian in any case. I've been to Japan and people ride their bikes on the pavement all the time there and I don't think it's a problem. If cyclists are being prosecuted for not having lights/cycling on the pavement/going through red lights then shouldn't pedestrians be prosecuted for crossing the street not at a designated crossing etc?

Mean while, motorists continue to kill in excess of 5 people a day in this country and are responsible for 20,000 serious injuries a year.

But we'll continue shuffle deck chairs on titanic by dealing with a couple of anti social cyclists.

Mr Arnold's conviction is the reason I never use shared use paths. I stand the chance of being struck off the register and losing my livelihood if I get a criminal record. It's just not worth the risk of a council arbitrarily changing their mind about an section of footway.

Quote:

“However, riding a bike without consideration for others has inherent dangers to both the cyclist and other road users, be they pedestrians, motorists or other cyclists...

I'd love to see his logic behind cyclists causing a danger to motorists... except by being forcibly inserted via the windshield at high speed.

And of course some platitudes about inherent dangers, not even giving consideration about what or whom is hurting people on the roads.

Lazy speech by a lazy-thinking police officer.

i'd ask Sir Graham where this plague of reports is, because they don't appear in the FOI. What a tit.

PCC has a very finely ground axe it seems.

I presume by his focus on almost non existent anti-social cycling that drunkenness by people on weekend binges and whenever football matches are on never occurs and everyone are perfectly well behaves.

What about all the anti-social speeding etc & parking