Council in Cheshire village warns dangerous, sweary and urinating cyclists

Rode with the Weaver Valley CC in the the 60's and 70's and often rode through Great Budworth on training rides and club runs.   No trouble in those days from the anti cycling rabble who are happy to accept ever increasing motor traffic and all the deaths, injuries and damage resulting from this love affair but somehow see cyclists as a threat to middle England.

I later worked as Cycling Officer for Oxfordshire County Council and was astonished by the anti cycling rants expressed at public meetings where the County was proposing  pro walking and cycling initiatives.

I guess cyclists remain the last recognisable minority which is still acceptable to publicly attack.   Sadly, the media tends  to support such views and indeed often initiates them.   At the same time we do not see these anti cycling attitudes in the rest of Europe, leading to the question why is it that this is the situation in the UK.   Is their some inherent nastiness in some of our fellow citizens?

Jacob Brown, 18, said: "They just go really fast through all the village and don't slow down. The fact is cyclists do cause problems for us they don't seem to care what the do and they need to be told to pipe down.

"One nearly crashed into my brother's car as he was pulling out of the drive and shouted at him."

I truly think there is [are] legs in the clubs turning up at the council meetings.

Higher moral ground and all that.

The other stuff...meh

Clickbait and you all fell for it!

If you stopped for a second to see how bitter, reactionary and angry you all sound, you'd appreciate the irony of your accusations against these villagers.

Comments on this site are like the daily mail sometimes, only with the opposite views!

What's all this cycling? Gt Budworth is a local village for local people. There is nothing for you here.  This is a community. We don't bother the outside world, we don't want it bothering us. We'll have no trouble here!

I like Gt Budworth, it's nice to ride through.  As others have said though, you're either climbing or approaching a blind, fast junction, so there's no way anyone's clogging it through there.

I am tempted to buy a case of Lucozade (who drinks that on a bike?!), empty all the bottles, place them in a courier-style bag over my shoulder, then ride down there and throw the empties while shouting "Bastard, bollocks, shit, twat, knobface, fuck fuckity fuck!" 

As an aside, and for those unfamiliar, Gt Budworth looks really old-school, they use it on TV sets for programmes set in the 50s and so on; all they have to do is remove the cars and hey presto.  A side-effect of this is that the landscape wasn't designed to include all the driveways that you see on a modern estate.  Ergo, there can be quite a lot of cars parked on the street, and that will create more issues than this.

To be fair, this retweet does seem to suggest they recognise motorists are a big problem.  https://twitter.com/cheshirepolice/status/750013818441494528

But overall, its the usual myopic anti-cyclist brigade.  just ignore them. They'll pop their clogs in a couple of years.

Actually, I've witnessed cyclists relieving themselves in innapropriate spots. One at the entrance to a cemetry, whilst a funeral cortege was going in.  Quite what goes through the mind of someone doing that I'll never now.  Go for a try before you leave, find a more hidden spot etc.

I've also been accused of riding 'at least 40mph' through a village, by someone who then claimed they pulled out because they didn't see me... My GPS said I was doing 13mph, up a hill.

Putting aside the fact that the accusations are clearly a mish-mash of bollocks, and that blaming two local CCs would be clueless, what we are seeing here is a cyclist hating bikelash in the rural fringe areas near towns and cities: day ride range. It's strong in Surrey, in the New Forest they have control of the park authority, and clearly the Daily Mail are supporters. Every time another village complains, it generates more pressure for  "some form of regulation" , be it on single file, numbers of riders, etc. Look at the New Forest "guidelines for cycling events" as an example: numbers, width, effectively number plates for participants. 

I don't know what can be done here except maybe followup articles showing how bollocks this villages claims are. But would they get printed? And then read?

On a brighter note, Bristol and its regions, including the bits of England and Wales across the Severn Bridge, do not appear to have so much hate noisily making their presence known (albeit with some complaints about the Welsh velothon road closures). If anyone is feeling persecuted in Surrey: head west 

Come on, you all know that we are thugs and louts, spending thousands on bikes and reeking havoc wherever we ride. 

Could set up a Hells cycle chapter haha!

Typical elitist village attitude. The slightest out of the ordinary, complaints start!  Sounds like speed guns by the elitist residents will be the order of the day. 

Perhaps who the letters were addressed to can attend the next parish meeting and find out who is the cause of this menacing behaviour, asking residents to get some documentary proof that it happens and who has done it. Then the clubs can take some action against the members that are falling below the standard. A mutual agreement and respect could work wonders.

Im pretty sure they'll never get anything though because it sounds like nonsense to me. 

The parish can't complain there isn't a two way dialogue which can be constructive that way. We all know it's a bit Royston Vasey there though. 

This explains why a woman drove at me as I was struggling up the hill into Great Budworth last week.

I find the idea that I might drink Lucozade offensive. To whom may I complain?

This follows almost exactly the same format of complaint that New Forest cyclists were getting. They're difficult to see (yet they proceed in huge packs)

They're too quiet to hear coming (yet they shout & swear a lot)

They're a menace to [insert name of thing that feels menanced] (in spite of their being no single documented collision/injury involving cyclist and [thing]).

They travel too fast (yet they somehow also cause traffic congestion).

You could make a bingo card out of these sort of complaints. Bonus point for mention of not having road tax or insurance!

The correct response, is of course to secretly inform the Chinese authorities of another idylic village, to which they should send coachloads of visitors.

I feel the same about the cars racing through my town. 

Who can I write to to get them banned?

Although the hill parking issue I referred to above is round the corner on High Street.

Might have been a bit too clever for my own with cut & pasting google maps. Suffice to say, I'm glad I'm not having to push a pram up Westage Lane too often.

Damn freedom of movement. It allows Eastern Europeans to come over here and fix our plumbing and pick our strawberries. And it allows cyclists to ride through our villages and get in the way of our massive Range Rovers. I say brick up the lanes, even if it does means going back to a subsistence living, surviving on nothing but locally-grown crops. Even if the parish councillors all run away and they have to put that bloody difficult woman who scares the school kids in charge.

That said, while the Lucozade bottles are clearly bollocks, I can unfortunately believe that some cyclists make a lot of noise. I did the Dunwich Dynamo for the third time last year, after a gap of ten years since the first two, and it made me sad how many riders now seem to give no thought whatsoever to the appropriateness of shouting at the top of their lungs. And that was in the dead of night, right in the middle of villages.

They seem to hate pedestrians too.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.2949793,-2.5046886,3a,75y,57.38h,59.01t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_cK9jj5_WpKC8vqzSuY64g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

"The meeting addressed issues including speeding motorists and implementing parking restrictions."

I would bet money that someone mentioned cycling as an alternative to driving into the village. The complaints about cycling are an attempt to distract attention from what is really damaging the village.

In essence, grown men (unfortunately) saying that a big boy did it and ran away, can we still keep our out-sized Tonka toys?

I might pee in a Lucozade bottle and ride quickly through the village swearing before chucking the bottle at a local resident.

What i go from the article was quotes from two moaning octogenarians and no actual mention of a ban, which would be unenforceable, and a new desire to ride through their 'Great' village to see what all the fuss is about.

I regularly ride through this village, normally on my lonesome or in a small group, and  find the accusation that I might do so while simultaneously swearing and urinating quite frankly laughable. A few sportives do go through there though - but that's a short window on a handful of Sunday mornings per year - as opposed to intimation there's a regular ongoing parade of two-wheeled obscenity through the place.

As folk have pointed out upthread, the the main road in and out of the village's western side is on a hill. And I can confirm that, as other folk have pointed upthread, it's doubtful whether a cyclist going down this hill would exceed the speeds which many cars regularly reach on the same stretch - particularly as the hill terminates in a dangerous blind junction with a main road. However I do think the hill factor provides some insight into what is going on in the minds of this council though. Almost all the way up the hill road on weekend days are parked cars, which effectively reduce the width of the road to a single carriageway. This means that any cyclist (or cyclists, or even another motorist for that matter) will have a high likelihood of having to confront oncoming vehicle traffic in their path. This makes it a potentially dangerous affair for the cyclist riding downhill, if the oncoming driver in their path doesn't give way. But, for the (inevitably slower) rider coming up the hill, the chances of encountering head- on traffic are even higher, given the longer amount of time they'd spend traversing this stretch. Someone then has to give way and, guess what, it's invariably the more vulnerable but more manoeuvrable cyclist. They either then do so - moving across to the pavement (no doubt a source for more council irritation) and/or finding themselves in an unforeseen and unintended stand-off with a motorist on (no doubt an occasional source of the alleged 'swearing').The motorist, no doubt irritated by the delay to their journey, then carries on their way, while their cyclist tries to get going up the hill again, and forever connecting Great Budworth with a memorable near-miss experience. 

It's likely that the majority of cars parked on this hill, and effectively turning a perfectly safe country road into a one way, stand-off prone zone, belong to local residents. The solution would be to remove this parking hazard by placing double yellow lines along the entire stretch. But why do that when you can scapegoat cyclists instead?