An inquiry into cycle safety showcased some MPs' ignorance and spent too long on irrelevancies
As you might expect from a Guardian journalist, as a rule I'm in favour of democracy. But if anything was to persuade me as to the merits of some sort of benign dictatorship it would be being forced to repeatedly watch the House of Commons transport select committee discuss cycling.
For the many of you fortunate enough to not view the committee's near two-hour session about cycle safety on Monday afternoon I simply don't have the words to describe how disheartening and shambolic I found it. To give you some sort of flavour of my reaction, in a likely breach of all sort of social media rules I've collated my own despairing tweets tweets from the time.
I could describe the hearing as unilluminating – some of the ignorance and lack of basic knowledge from a few MPs on the committee was staggering – but in one sense it was, sadly, all too enlightening.
It was a reminder that when it comes to cycling policy in Britain, we remain, for the most part, in the age of the dinosaur. The odd politician talks an occasional good game on bikes, but look at too many mainstream MPs and we're right back in the 1960s, where bikes are a toy, or a faddish "pursuit", perilous and mistrusted, while all must lie down in homage to "the economy", a narrowly-defined set of interests with motorised pistons beating at their heart.
The session followed the recent deaths of six cyclists in London and saw the 11-member committee first quiz a series of cycling representatives and police, then a trio of bigwigs from the road haulage world, along with Andrew Gilligan, cycle adviser to London's mayor, Boris Johnson, and an expert from the Transport Research Laboratory.
In some quarters the spate of deaths has sparked an impassioned, informed debate about lorry access to city roads and how cyclists can be better protected by road infrastructure, plus on more marginal side issues like headphone use and high-vis for the two-wheeled.
To me, it seemed the MPs were obsessed with the side issues. Could bike helmet use be made compulsory, wondered Labour MP Sarah Champion early on? How's a bike helmet going to help me if a lorry turns left across me, I wondered in response?
Then things started to get really strange.
Jason McCartney, a Tory MP, asked if there was "a war ongoing" between cars and bikes. Then his party colleague, Martin Vickers, asked – and he was being entirely serious – if the panel felt cyclists should "contribute" financially to the upkeep of roads.
Yes, that's right. The "road tax" question, the litmus test for someone who not only doesn't understand the very basics about cycling policy but hasn't the barest minimum of intellectual curiosity about it. Silly enough in a pub conversation. For an MP, let alone an MP on the transport select committee, let alone an MP on the transport select committee discussing cycling, it's unforgivable.
I realise MPs are very, very busy people, but "road tax" as was ended in 1937. It's like discussing HS2 and asking about the steam locomotives.
In any sane universe this would have been the cue for some of Vickers' colleagues to haul him out of his chair by his lapels, deposit him in the corridor and begin manually scribbling out any mention of his name from committee literature.
Instead, Labour's Jim Dobbin launched into a series of fuzzy anecdotes about miscreant cyclists and scratched car paintwork before asking – again in seriousness – if a solution for our current cycle safety woes could be to force all cyclists to be registered, tested, and to put their bikes through a sort of MoT test.
It was at this point that panelists like Ashok Sinha from the London Cycling Campaign and Katja Leyendecker from Newcastle's equivalent group adopted the sort of fixed half-grin you'd use if faced by a backward but stubborn primary school class.
Some people might genuinely believe that Dobbin's prescription is a good one. But, if you'll pardon the patronising tone, this view isn't shared by a single person with a serious knowledge of cycling policy. As someone on the panel pointed out (I forget who) there's not a country in the world that does these things for the simple reason that they massively curtail cycle use.
Just when you thought it could get no more surreal Labour's Sarah Champion began a long plea about the mortal peril posed to horse riders by cyclists. Yes, cyclists.
Part two was arguably more depressing still. The MPs, who had been quite interrogative towards the cycle groups (albeit mainly on irrelevancies) gave the haulage group representatives a far easier time. Jack Semple, policy head of the Road Haulage Association, was left utterly unchallenged when he repeatedly singled out cyclist behaviour as the reason for them being killed by lorries, an assertion for which there is, as far as I understand, no evidence.
For good measure another Tory member, Karen Lumley, reminisced fondly about her cycle proficiency test at school and wondered if there was anything similar these days. Yes Karen, I wanted to shout at the screen, it's called Bikeability, it's been around for years, and anyone who knows or cares the slightest jot about cycle training will have heard of it. Maybe ask the schools in your constituency about it.
By this point, you might have worked out, I was a bit angry. Why? Two reasons, one general, one much more personal.
To begin with, the longer dinosaurs that like Dobbin roam the Westminster corridors the more Britain risks falling behind bolder nations, damaging both people's lives and the economy.
On Friday I had a fascinating chat with Jan Gehl, the Danish architect who pioneered the idea of liveable cities, for a story running later this week.
Cities are changing, he argued. Once they competed on things like parking spaces and skyscrapers. Now it's all about liveability – about the human. People don't want 60mph urban freeways or rumbling lorries, they want pavement cafes, and safe and convenient walking or cycling.
There are, he noted, three big annual lists of the world's most liveable cities. Not one of them features anywhere in the UK.
Then there's a more selfish level, I'm still (just) young and healthy enough to mix it with the London traffic. It's sometimes fun, sometimes less so, and I know the risks are, statistically, minimal. However, I won't always be sufficiently gung ho. I'd love to think that when I'm in my 60s, 70s and older I can tootle round London (or wherever I live) in a civilised, secure way, wearing tweed (I plan to develop a later-life interest in tweed), not high-vis, sharing the byways with families, not lorries.
Similarly, my three-year-old son adores riding his bike, but as long as politicians like Vickers and Dobbin are the norm he will never, realistically, really be able to cycle to school, except on the pavement.
That makes me sad, and it makes me angry.
via Environment: Bike blog | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/dec/03/transport-committee-cycling
