Caz comes home with yet more stories of being cut up, passed too close, generally treated like crap by motorists. In York, this self proclaimed ‘Cycling City’. And with a child on the back of her tandem. It makes me want to take up arms against them.
Twenty five years ago I wrote an essay on car culture for the humanities component of my degree course. It was titled ‘The Car Carry-on’ (see what I did there?). In it I argued that cycling could never thrive in the UK unless something radical was done about The Motor Car. I suggested that the Oil Industry was in cahoots with the Car Industry which was in bed with the Steel Industry. I said that the Advertising Industry, TV and other media were all in thrall to the car. At that time car ownership was on a steep rise. Cars were/are aspirational and that everyone who could afford to had bought in to the myth of automotive freedom presented by the adverts. Lack of a car suggested failure – then as now. The situation hasn’t changed. Today, as then, if you’re a professional person, a ‘someone’, you simply must have a car. I also pointed out that it was highly probable that each and every one of the professionals who were in the business of making decisions about town planning, development, road building, architecture were therefore car drivers. And it follows that each of those people would be making professional decisions based on their own set of notions. We’ve ended up with a car centric society because all the people who work in the media, local government, the automotive industry etc etc all have a personal vested interest in its continuation.
In twenty five years the situation has only got worse.
Cortina wreck by Sue Darlow
There is a mindset – the prevalent mindset – that cars are ‘normal’. And it therefore follows that anything which falls outside of that must be subnormal. This seething mass of motorists at the top of our society has decided – as one, like a swarm of insects – that the mass use of private motor vehicles is a valid transport system. We, as individuals can buy into this utopia/dystopia if we choose but if we do not – they say – we’d better get out of their way.
They say it every day by cutting us up, passing us too close, treating us as subnormal. They do it every day. They do it to me, they do it to my girl and they do it to her children. They do it to every cyclist. Because what they want is for us to give up, to stop being cyclists and to join them. To be assimilated into the group.
I know people – perfectly rational and intelligent people – who hate ‘cyclists’. Otherwise loving and caring individuals who will treat a person differently because they happen to be riding a bicycle. I know cyclists who, when they get behind the wheel, hate cyclists. This is how far we have come in the normalisation of the car. We are starting to hate ourselves.
As we’ve previously discussed – in polls of non-cyclists the number one reason for not cycling is the (perceived*) danger posed by motor vehicles. And in the same polls they claim that the single most important thing that would make them more likely to cycle is the provision of more cycling facilities. By which we mean presumably cycle lanes on roads, separate cycle tracks etc.
Among the folk who care about such things there is a big on-going and often heated debate. The Separatists argue that motor vehicles and bicycles are fundamentally incompatible and require their own facilities. They argue that the failure of cycling as a mode of transport in UK and US towns and cities is a direct result of the lack of dedicated, exclusive infrastructure.
‘Vehicular Cyclists’ argue that removing the victims of danger from the danger is grossly unfair – we should be removing the source of the danger. They argue that bicycles are not incompatible with motor vehicles but that it’s motorist’s attitudes which need adjusting. That perhaps if the road system hadn’t been designed for the exclusive benefit of motor traffic we might stand a better chance. If government and the courts and Police took road deaths and injuries more seriously we might have safer roads.
But of course they are all drivers too.
Selling cycling to a nation of cyclist hating motorists is a hiding to nothing. Even if we were to pool our resources how can we – the cycling industry, cyclists organisations and individual cyclists – ever hope to compete with Car Culture, the billions of pounds spent on car ads, the ingrained mythology of the car?
Answers on a postcard to the usual address….
