Full text, below. The Spectator now requires registration so I have
fewer qualms about violating their copyright.
Listen hard and you can hear J. Bonington-Jagworth grumbling loudly.
The Association of London Government has announced that it is to fine
motorists up to £100 a time for driving in the capital’s cycle lanes.
The RAC Foundation, one of the many real-life organisations which have
come to ape Peter Simple’s splendid Motorists’ Liberation Front, has
already complained. Soon the dinner parties of Fulham will reverberate
to moans that it is all but damned impossible to negotiate the King’s
Road at more than 50 mph without landing a wheel or two of your Super
Yobbo Sports Utility Vehicle in a cycle lane.
We are inclined towards a libertarian approach to government.
Nevertheless, it won’t prevent us from asking whether there might
actually be some merit in the business of creating and policing cycle
lanes. Unless one is going to embrace anarchy, it is impossible not
feel sympathy with the London cyclist who is obliged to do battle with
an angry stream of powered vehicles. If there ever was a proper role
for the law, it is surely in protecting the weak and vulnerable.
Sadly, it has become a grim orthodoxy in certain conservative circles
that motorists’ rights must be supported at all costs and that lesser
forms of road traffic, namely cyclists and pedestrians, must
necessarily be treated with contempt. According to this philosophy,
all motorists are red-blooded, free-born Englishmen merely attempting
to mind their own business, while all cyclists and pedestrians are
smug environmental fascists motivated by some puritanical desire to
stop people having fun. True, there is some merit in this view; there
are, indeed, some people who claim to have discovered mankind’s true
vocation the moment that they venture out on a bicycle, and who care
little for the needs of a mother of four children, isolated in a
shopless village, attempting to deliver her young charges to various
schools or bring home enough nuggets to feed her ravenous brood.
Yet it is a travesty to claim that there is some kind of ‘war against
the motorist’ in progress. The concept of fining motorists for
reckless behaviour is hardly new: the first driver to find himself on
the wrong side of the law was a Kentish miller by the name of Walter
Arnold, fined one shilling for rampaging through the streets of
Paddock Wood at the speed of eight miles per hour in January 1896. New
Labour did not even introduce speed cameras to Britain’s roads. Much
though the Conservatives love to try to make political capital from
standing up against them now — this week they announced a review of
cameras — it was they who introduced the wretched things to our
streets in 1992.
Transport policy encompasses everything that is depressing about
public administration in modern Britain, from sclerotic bureaucracy to
ill-thought-out populist gestures, wrapped up in a grandiose waste of
our money. Take speed cameras. Although they are dumb animals in many
respects — useless, for example, at detecting the morons who
‘tailgate’ you at 70 mph on the motorway — no sooner were they found
to be doing their job than the government rendered them next to
useless by painting them bright yellow, allowing reckless motorists to
slow down for a few yards before accelerating away again on their
murderous passage.
Or take the countless ‘cycling initiatives’ which the government has
launched over the past few years. They always follow the same pattern:
a minister in helmet turns up at a school for a photocall with lots of
grinning seven-year-olds. Then the council spends £500,000 on a
feasibility study, which, following complaints from the bus-driving
unions, ends up consisting of painting on the roads a few stretches of
‘cycle path’ which last for a mere 20 yards before delivering the
cyclist straight into a bollard or into the path of oncoming traffic.
Parents wisely decide that they are not, after all, going to risk
letting little Rupert or Samantha pedal to school, so they go and buy
an even bigger and better SUV instead.
For a fraction of the money wasted on strategies, feasibility studies
and half-hearted public works, the country could have a decent network
of cycle paths entirely removed from road traffic. Just look at
Holland, where you can happily pedal from one end of the country to
the other on dedicated tracks. Why can’t we do the same here? In the
countryside such a network could be provided at minimal cost. The thin
strips of land required ought to cost no more than the average £2,500
an acre commanded by agricultural land; better still, the land should
be forcibly handed over to the public good in return for the mountains
of agricultural subsidy paid to farmers over the past half century.
There is only one thing standing in the way of this great contribution
to health, the environment and human happiness: patheticness. Our
public administrators have come to resemble a grumbling DIYer who
keeps promising to put up a bookshelf; and who after several months’
prevarication finally gets going on the project only to bash his thumb
with the hammer and abandon the whole business. If they can overcome
their instinctive nastiness towards non-motorists, perhaps cycle paths
might even provide an opening for the Tories.