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news
Castle Street, Cardiff (Credit: No Swan So Fine, Wikimedia Commons)‘Get off your bike and walk’: Female cyclist “petrified” after man grabs bike and refuses to let go
A female cyclist was left “petrified” and “visibly shaking” after a man confronted her while she was riding on a cycle lane. The man, who appears to have attended a nearby concert, grabbed the woman’s bike and told her to ‘get off and walk’. After a steward at the event intervened to fend off the attacker, another man “aggressively” jumped into the bike lane in front of the cyclist.
Climate activist Clare James was cycling through Cardiff city centre on Thursday night as concertgoers were leaving singer Lewis Capaldi’s gig in Cardiff Castle, WalesOnline reports.
To allow the crowds to exit the venue safely, Castle Street had been closed to traffic, though the cycle lane remained open.
> Lone female cyclists are “being targeted”, says former Scottish champion
49-year-old James, who works for campaign group Climate Cymru, was riding through the crowds “at a snail’s pace”, when a man grabbed her bike by the handlebars.
“I said: ‘What are you doing?’ and he said: ‘Get off your bike now and walk’,” she told WalesOnline.
The man, believed to be in his 20s, then told her that she shouldn’t be cycling on the road, to which James replied that she was cycling in an open bike lane.
“But he was really aggressive and within a very short space of time I was really feeling very intimidated,” James said.
The cyclist also noted that the attacker ignored other people riding bikes in the lane, who she says were mostly male delivery riders.
She continued: “People started to come over and people were saying: ‘Let her go’. I think because they could see that I was in quite a bad state they were saying: ‘Are you okay?’”
> Female cyclist held down and bike stolen during frightening attack
After failing to attract the attention of nearby police officers, eventually a steward working at the concert intervened and removed the man from the scene, allowing Clare to leave.
However, as she continued on the cycle lane, “shaking” after the encounter, another man – who was walking along the footpath – spotted her and “aggressively” and “determinedly” jumped in front of Clare. Fortunately, the traffic lights soon changed, which enabled the 49-year-old to flee.
Following the two back-to-back incidents, Clare says she was targeted because she “stood out as a woman on a bike”.
She said: “It was so obvious [the first man] was just going to pick on me because I was an easy target… there’s no way he would have done that if I wasn’t a woman.”
“There were two men, as far as I'm concerned last night, that really just wanted to be intimidating. They plucked me off, because I was on a bike and because I’m a woman.”
While Clare’s husband suggested closing streets to cyclists after concerts as a potential solution to the problem of harassment, she believes that “men’s attitudes towards women” were the root cause of the incidents, and that active travel to and from events should still be encouraged.
“I said [to my husband]: ‘No, no - maybe men shouldn't be like that’. That’s the issue. It doesn't matter whether you close the cycle lane, whether there’s drinking involved, whether there are crowds," she added.
While Clare says that she feels “reasonably safe” while cycling in Cardiff, and that the shocking incidents won’t prevent her from riding her bike, she says that Thursday’s night ordeal has caused her to reflect on her safety as a female cyclist.
“But I have to say that it's definitely made me far more aware that I'm not as safe on my bike as I think from people who are on foot, from pedestrians,” she concluded.
There have been a number of attacks on lone female cyclists in recent months, though unlike Thursday’s incidents these have mostly involved targeted robberies by violent moped gangs.
In April we reported that a woman was held down and had her bike stolen by two men in Surrey. The cyclist was sat on Beddlestead Lane, near Warlingham in Surrey, when she was approached by two men on a scooter.
Surrey Police say the incident, which happened between 1.40pm and 2.15pm, saw the victim held to the ground while the offenders made off with her bike down Clarks Lane.
In response, cycling clubs across south London had warned members to only ride in groups, and more recently former Scottish champion Jennifer George — who finished eleventh in last month’s British time trial championships — repeated the warning having been attacked herself on two separate occasions since April.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- Car Delenda Est 13 min 39 sec ago
it seems that a lot, if not most, driving instructors teach that you only need to indicate in the presence of other motor vehicles, cyclists and...
- Smoggysteve 2 hours 14 min ago
Electromagnets. Means you need a power source. Not the same. 🤦🏻♂️
- wtjs 2 hours 41 min ago
She clearly had no idea that she was doing anything wrong and had therefore decided I was being some kind of letch...
- Steve K 3 hours 17 min ago
It's worse than that - it is 50% heavier than they claim
- chrisonabike 3 hours 31 min ago
Thanks for the review! If it's this one it appears to be the Cyclops design (compare that to the Dutch urban cycle-priority roundabout here)....
- Cycle Happy 3 hours 45 min ago
Disable the speaker in two air tags. Very easy to do and numerous How To videos on YouTube. Then put a dead battery in one of the tags and leave it...
- belugabob 4 hours 48 min ago
Tiny little pencils?
- wtjs 4 hours 49 min ago
They were not playing ball at first, but I think saying he was going to go at 11am on Monday forced their hand and made it difficult to ignore ...
- ChasP 6 hours 15 min ago
I would imagine just to be able to sit down, if they wanted to pedal they could just get a bike?
- mdavidford 7 hours 49 min ago
Harsh on Ryan, but OK...
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75 comments
Why is it relevant that she is a climate activist or where she works? Surely this makes it worse for her with online trolls etc. Why mention it twice?
Because the original newspaper article mentions it? Although I suppose you have shown it is a self fulfilling prophecy that the online trolls would pick up on that.
Huh? Are you saying I'm an online troll?
Anyway, the article was seemingly compiled by someone, don't they have some ability to leave that needless info out? She's been harassed, doesn't need more.
Personally I don't see a problem with the same info from the newspaper being put here.
And I'm just pointing out that if, as you state, only online trolls will have any issue that she works at a climate agency, and you are the only person to pick that up as an issue online here, then are you outing yourself as an online troll?
Pffft...I'm merely suggesting that the poor woman might not appreciate having her place of work etc. rehashed and being on the internet.
You really are tiresome with your Judean People's Front rants, unable to see out of that one eye.
For the full effect you seem to want you missed "little" as in "poor little woman". Obviously she welcomes your concern for her protection though.
EDIT - quiff said it more nicely; given some of your previous form I don't believe your concern is coming from a good place. Or rather - it's ideological. I'd be delighted if you would prove me wrong though.
I'm sure your concern comes from a good place, and I agree that her occupation, age etc are irrelevant to the story, but she posted about it herself on Twitter, where her bio makes clear she is a climate activist.
Because by the time they wrote the second mention they'd forgotten that they'd written the first one. (And the subheader.)
They have to bring it up in every conversation, much like vegans. It's such a part of their identity that it has consumed their entire personality. In my experience these people tend to be toxic to be around.
Or the newspaper decided to post it for their own reasons. They didn't use quotation marks so it is not like she said it in the interview. A small profile is normally asked for in these things. It is why there was always a mention of age, or where people lived in articles.
Although I do like you think climate control activists are toxic to be around days after we had such extreme temperatures in Europe.
Act in an extreme way and you'll get an extreme reaction. When your protest becomes disruptive, violent or destructive it should be curbed. At that point you're pretty much just rioting.
If everyone thought like you then women still wouldn't have the vote and slavery would be a lot more common.
But - just taking the case of women's suffrage - was a particular factor decisive, were all needed? Was it the terrorism, lobbying / awareness raising or (war) economics?
We'd need to muck around with alternate timelines to find out that for certain and I'm not going to do that again!
Protests, disruption and riots are a clear sign that the leaders/politicians are listening to their corporate masters instead of the people.
So this sh!tshow we're in is your fault, is it???
It all went wrong in 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
You make a very good point but sadly slavery is more common now than ever.
Love the LGBTQ picture.
Surely it would be far worse if the Civil Rights Movement was 'curbed' by people like Jenova20?
I'm not arguing one way or the other. I just felt like pointing out the increase in slavery as I'm guessing most people think it has pretty much been eradicated.
Fair enough
Although I would argue that the "modern" definition of slavery also happened in the past, along with the "normal" belief of slavery. After all forced marriages, working for very low pay in abysmal conditions and child soldiers all happened in the past. They were just called serfs or work houses, arranged marriages, or squires. I saw some footage recently doing the rounds with a three year old chimney sweep and that was in 1930.
I've read a few sources saying that there are more slaves now than at any time in history. What you say makes perfect sense so perhaps the total is more but the percentage of the ever growing world population remains roughly the same. Either way it's an incredibly sad indictment on how some humans treat others.
And how well have the people building the world cup stadia in Qatar been treated, again? Indentured servitude is pretty darned close to 'classic' slavery IMO.
While indentured servitude is definitely a form of slavery, and very evil, it's still quite far from 'classic' chattel slavery. Remember that as a chattel slave your children (if you were ordered to have them) would have belonged to your master.
This is also the case with indentured servitude; the debt passes on from generation to generation.
I think – might well be wrong – that Hawkinspeter lives in Bristol. If I'm right on that, Im sure he knows about ice cream: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-45720510
I do indeed live in Bristol, but I wasn't aware of Lopresti, though that is south of the river in Bedminster.
More info here: https://thebristolcable.org/2019/10/revealed-an-anti-slavery-court-order-was-made-against-local-boss-lopresti-heres-evidence-it-may-be-being-breached/
Do go fuck yourself for that. What a disgusting comment to make.
Isn't it just the result of denying protests?
I don't mean to accuse you of being sexist or racist, but when a society has an entrenched power base that ignores the rights and voices of whole classes of people, then disruptive protest is about the only thing that works.
Can you think of any cause that "won" where you can show that disruptive protest appears to have been the key? Unfortunately the ones I can think of all had several different types of pressure at once - making a single "cause" hard to point at. So disruptive protest (or an "armed" / "violent" wing or at least credible threats from same), political movements, "ground-up" action - and possibly "other change in circumstances" too.
Thinking of Northern Ireland, changes in status for black people in the US, women's suffrage in the UK, gay rights, reversal of apartheid laws in South Africa...
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