Preposterous bicycle cult

Now it transpires that the ultimate Monty Python cycle sketch is about to become reality: the Euro bureaucracy has taken up the politically-correct bike crusade. The European Commission is proposing that car drivers become automatically financially responsible for all accidents involving a cyclist, irrespective of the actual circumstances.

The idea is to harmonise car insurance terms across the EU, just as we harmonise the shape of sausages. In Belgium and Scandinavia, car drivers are automatically liable on their insurance for incidents involving cyclists, regardless as to who is at fault.

That should add a good 50 quid to your premiums.

Before we dissect this daft idea, let us deconstruct the cycle myth. First, let us deal with ordinary two-wheel users. These are normally fit young people who are seemingly illiterate and colour blind. I postulate the latter, because they appear to have a scant knowledge of the Highway Code. And even if they do, they seem incapable of understanding that red lights apply to two-wheeled, pedal-operated craft as well as to those powered by internal combustion engines.

How often each day do you see cyclists calmly shooting the lights while their car-bound compatriots wait for the amber? This blithe arrogance is obviously dangerous, foolhardy and problematic for others. Having watched one such lunatic mistime his dash for freedom and intersect with a bus on Princes Street, my heart immediately went out to the distraught bus driver and the frustrated passengers.

The rise of the cycle lobby has instilled in even ordinary bike jockeys a feeling of invulnerability that seems to justify their refusal to obey the Highway Code, to the danger of themselves and the rest of us.

Even when not shooting red lights, the other thing the cyclists routinely do is overtake motorists on their blind side with no thought to the heart attacks they cause. OK, I understand the cyclists find it safer close to the curb. But taking the attitude that it is totally the responsibility of the person in the four-wheel job to watch out on both wings, while the biker rushes through on the inside as if practising for the Tour de France, is suicidal - for the motorist. The number of near heart attacks I’ve seen caused to drivers by cyclists appearing from nowhere is now beyond count. Not to mention crumpled passenger doors caused by cyclists going for Commonwealth gold.

Which brings us to the next denizen of the bicycle zoo: the cycle lobbyists.

These are the militants, the Wahhabi fundamentalists of the two-wheeler religion. I once had to work with one on a television project. He dressed the part: the garishly coloured Lycra long-johns, even indoors. The rakish, streamlined crash helmet. And the expensive accessories, such as the cycle pump he always carried on his person - too valuable to leave on his urban mountain bike.

But this guy came armed. He carried a horn attached to a gas canister. He showed us in the pub what it could do and damn near deafened the entire room.

This secret weapon was designed for use against motorists who offended his cyclist’s right to dominate the road. Any poor driver who was deemed to have cut in, or unwittingly not given enough inside room to our hero, was given a blast.

Meekly, I suggested that the result of this terrorism might be to inadvertently scare a driver out of his or her wits, causing a serious accident. For my pains, the Mad Bicycle Mullah pushed the horn in my direction and started blasting it. I think he was trying to demonstrate I was exaggerating. Fortunately, he stopped before the pub decided to lynch him.

The trouble is that the cycle lobby has beeped its portable foghorns at the spineless politicians, and the latter have caved in. On the surface, promoting greater bike use sounds appealing: less traffic congestion, less pollution, less noise (if you don’t count the killer foghorns) and better health.

But remember the politicians also told us that nuclear energy would be clean and too cheap to meter.

Here is the reality of the bike crusade: the politicians have spent a fortune on cycle lanes but the proportionate number of cycle journeys has decreased. Cycling in Britain now accounts for less than 2 per cent of all journeys compared to 80 per cent using cars. Britons made an average of 16 trips by cycle in 2001, down from 21 a decade before that. It really is true that those garishly-coloured cycle lanes that disfigure our cities are empty. Why?

Because we live in a country that is dark half the year and where it rains. Cars are more utilitarian and always will be.

The EU plan to make motorists pay for all bike accidents will soon be debated in the European Parliament (so write to your MEP now). This bureaucratic wheeze stems from the fact that, in the words of the Commission, "motor vehicles cause most accidents. Whoever is responsible, pedestrians and cyclists usually suffer more".

But wait - given there are many more cars about than bikes, saying cars cause most accidents is merely a statistical truism.

If the cyclists want parity on the roads, then why not make it mandatory that anyone using a bike on a public road also has to have insurance, rather than be cross-subsidised by private motorists? In addition, it is now absolutely necessary in road safety terms that no-one is allowed to use a bike on public roads without a cycle licence, acquired only after sitting a test equivalent to that for a car licence. And with a written Highway Code test.

Finally, let me reveal a secret. Especially before the bike lobby reaches for its laptops in order to denounce me for being in the pay of the car manufacturers. I don’t possess a driving licence. But, as a lowly pedestrian, the nearest I’ve ever come to personal destruction on the road was in Beijing in China, with nary a car on those wide, wide dusty streets.

One would be walking along in calm reflection when all of a sudden a silent wall of steel would rush from out of nowhere. A phalanx of literally several thousand cyclists in tight formation, all heading straight for one. If you were lucky, one or two cyclists might ring an out-of-tune bell by way of warning, but this was deceptive. From behind, it sounded like a solitary cyclist, not the advancing wall of death which had no intention of stopping for anything as lowly as a pedestrian.

This, gentle reader, is the future the cycle lobby has in store for us - if we don’t fight back.