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Houses of Parliament (CC licensed by Rajan Manickavasagam:Flickr)PCSOs to get power to fine unlit cyclists
If you’re silly enough to ride at night without lights, it’s not just regular police you’ll have to look out for (not that you’ll be able to see them, of course): under a bill currently before Parliament, Police Community Support Officers are to get the power to stop unlit cyclists too.
Part 11 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill would give PCSOs the power to issue fixed penalty notices to cyclists riding without lights. In fact, since the bill refers to cyclists “contravening or failing to comply with a construction or use requirement about lighting equipment or reflectors for cycles” you might even get nabbed for having taken off your pedal reflectors.
Dr Julian Huppert MP, the chair of the All-party Parliamentary Committee for Cycling spoke in support of this clause of the bill, saying that law-breaking cyclists were “one of the banes of my life.”
Dr Huppert said: “It is right to extend powers to PCSOs, allowing them to issue fixed penalty notices to cyclists riding without lights. I am a huge champion of cycling. I was delighted when the House passed a motion to get Britain cycling.
“One of the banes of my life in that context is cyclists who do not obey the rules of the road. Anything that we can do to get people to cycle safely and legally will make it easier for those of us who want to extend facilities for cyclists.
“There are sensible ways forward. In Cambridge we have been using a “lights instead of tickets” campaign to make sure that people get their lights. I welcome the new clause as a sensible step forward.”
The powers of PCSOs to issue fixed penalty notices are limited to minor offences such as pavement cycling, littering and dog fouling. They have no powers to deal with similar but far more dangerous motoring offences such as driving on the pavement. According to DfT figures, 27 pedestrians were killed on pavements in 2012. We can find no reports of pedestrian fatalities involving pavement cyclists in 2012.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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53 comments
Support the idea in principle: the number of times I see 'bike ninjas' around at this time or year especially is ridiculous.
However, as above - PCSOs can't compel you to stop as far as I know; they can ask, but you can politely decline. Or have they been given power of arrest without me noticing?
edit: PCSOs do not have a power of arrest but they can require a suspect to remain with then until a police officers arrives. Pffff, good luck.
as i understand it a bike bough before 1985 is exempt from pedal reflectors, My road er...pedal powered vehicle was a) never bought, warranty replacement, b) a frame, i believe that the duty charged on frames and bicycles is different so someone has already decided that a bike and a frame aren't quite the same thing.
Do we really think the PCSOs are going to be able to distinguish between the many stupid details of the bike lighting regs?
Remember also that most front bike lights aren't actually legal, they need to be stamped BS or euro equivalent, not many are these days.
http://www.ctc.org.uk/cyclists-library/regulations/lighting-regulations
Yeah enforcement of cyclists riding without lights is a good idea in principle. But why single it out? Because it's the 'bane of this particular MP's life'?!
Why not get them to ticket cars in bike lanes or ASL'a, as others have suggested? After all it's about cyclists safety, right?
Or is it because we are an easy target?
Some more info on the reflector side of things would be nice.
I literally light up like a Christmas tree (red fairy lights on my bag, two rear flashers, 2 front lights), but I don't have any reflectors at all.
This is good but only if it is applied correct. Same with any road/traffic law
Do they have the power to order you to stop? I thought not, so can't you just ride off?
wonder if this will apply to rear reflectors too ???
my chromoplastics have a reflector, the Blumels do not !
'This is good surely. If you ride in the dark, show those lights!'
Precisely. What's not to like about this?
Is it just PCSOs that can issue tickets?
Or are there any other fancy dress costumes you can wear to issue them?
This is good surely. If you ride in the dark, show those lights!
I support this 100%, but hope they'd be flexible about my SPDs, which don't have reflectors. Like therealsmallboy I've got two front and two rear lights.
Won't be difficult to dish out fines in London, given the suicidal Sids who ride around without lights.
I can just picture it, a power crazy PCSO stopping bikes to check "the lighting" and issuing FPN on non-conforming reflective pedals. Its bad enough they issue fines for cycling on pavements when there is no danger posed to peds and they are using said path for safety.
Still no talk in Parliament about law changes to PROTECT cyclists and changes to sentences given out to drivers.
Would be great if they could ticket cars parked in mandatory cycle lanes. (But then the regular police don't bother doing that.)
That's because they're "not a banes of my life" !!
I was obviously under the wrong understanding that MP's were doing the job for the benefit of the people that elected them and not for the individual !!!
I agree with the objective of the bill but I can't see how they're going to enforce it.
Julian Huppert is not perfect but he's most certainly one of the best friends cyclists have in parliament. When he describes unlit cyclists as a bane of his life, it is probably because every time cycle safety or infrastructure comes up for debate some prat brings up the RLJs and unlit cyclists that they see 'all the time.' It may be borderline victim blaming but it certainly undermines arguments in our favour; anything that reduces that is to our benefit. I'd quite like to see the power to issue fixed penalty notices for cars in ASLs be given to PCSOs at the same time though!
I see where you're coming from on this, but I suspect that even if all cyclists were to magically use lights the relentless hostility to us would just be shifted to some other issue.
To me, this is not just a waste of effort which provides busy-bodies with another set of rules to catch out someone whose batteries died on the way home, but it's a legitimitation of the general hostility by someone that's supposed to be an advocate for cyclists.
It's exactly this which is indicative of the barely suppressed hostility to cyclists in this bill and why Huppert should be opposing it.
(On a personal level I'd oppose even that just because I think there are too many laws enforced by too many people with too many video cameras... but that's ancillary to the main issue.)
I'm not sure about this. I'm sure they're bringing the law in as the MP says in order to standardise cycling and make it easier for them to push through pro-cycling initiatives. Get rid of the pavement-riding, RLJing idiots. And fair enough.
All it's going to take is a trigger-happy PCSO to start pulling people without pedal reflectors though.
I commute by bike every day and am lit up like a tree. Hi-viz, reflective silver stripes, two lights on the front (one flashing), two on the rear (both flashing) and one on my helmet. I look a bit like a motorbike. Making a pro-active effort to be seen, in order to protect myself. That's all I'm really bothered about- not getting squashed. But my pedals don't have reflectors.
That makes me a perfect target for an idiot right? Like the 'you're all over the road' comments that me and my chain gang received from a Derbyshire Police officer for riding in a ten long, two wide training group.
I'm all for cutting the wheat from the chaff so that I'm not lumped in with the 'knobhead on the bike' category, but they do need to make a change to the law so that cyclists who have clearly made an effort to be visible are left well alone. Pedal reflectors or not.
The last time I checked (although that was a few years ago now) the law stated quite clearly that a rear-facing red light that's affixed to the bicycle shall be 'static' i.e. 'not flashing'. I was informed by a police officer that you could make use of dozens of flashing red lights about your person if you so desire, but a rear light affixed to your bike frame mustn't flash. I don't know if this is still correct, or how the law stands on flashing front lights, but I suppose that 'incorrect' lighting might be a more visible and obvious way than pedal reflectors for us to be knobbled by a potential jobsworth.
If you read the article i quoted above, basically a light that only flashed is legal, but a light that can be used non-flashing must be BS standard (or equivalent). As almost all lights currently for sale are non-bs ( you have to be certified not just fit the criteria) and have both flashing and static modes.
Simple answer your lights are probably illegal, but not because they flash.
There you go, ruining a nice debate with common sense again.
Would be great if they could ticket cars parked in mandatory cycle lanes. (But then the regular police don't bother doing that.)
cat1commuter - "Would be great if they could ticket cars parked in mandatory cycle lanes. (But then the regular police don't bother doing that.)"
Can anyone possibly clarify for me what the law actually is regarding mandatory cycle lanes? Because I see no indication that those white lines mean anything at all.
For example, there's one in Woolwich, just east of the Thames barrier, on a major cycle route, which when I used to go there was _always_ blocked by at least one parked car, sometimes up to six of them. There's one spot where a car is always parked (outside an off-licence I think). Never seen there NOT be a car parked there. Nothing is ever done about it, and I'm not even sure what the law actually is if there's no yellow line.
Or a few weeks ago I saw a driver pull up and park in a (different) mandatory cycle lane to pop into a shop, and then a policeman walked over towards it. "Ah, finally" I thought "he's going to tell them to move on". But no, the cop just walked right past it and went and instead went and confiscated some cans from some harmless street drinkers (its a no-public-drinking zone). Then he walked back past the illegally(?) parked vehicle and accosted some other pedestrian about something. He ignored the car and the driver eventually came out and drove off again.
Likewise the police never seem to pay any attention at all to pavement parking.
Anyway - having lights on bikes after dark is one of the very few areas where I sympathise with motorists and think they have a valid point. As far as I can see the current law is totally unenforced, the _majority_ of cyclists I see after dark have no lights.
from the Highway Code (rule 119):
Are there any signs indicating the operation of the cycle lane in your case? These might be just "no waiting" signs. If the cars are parked in them outside those hours then I am afraid the drivers are allowed to, even though it renders useless the bike lane (but hey ho!, another tick on the sustainable transport list for the local council, though!). If they are parked there during the hours of operation then, yes, they are illegally parked. But don't hold your breath getting anything done about it. I spent years trying to get a local authority to enforce their own parking restrictions in a mandatory bike lane and got absolutely nowhere - I think it is still used as a car park to this day.
Nah - that's the problem, I guess. I never see any such signs in any mandatory cycle lane I know of. So I guess drivers don't know when it applies either (assuming they even know what it is). The Woolwich one seems to _never_ be 'in operation'.
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