David Cameron's admission that he broke umpteen laws while cycling in London highlights a serious inequality between the rights and obligations of motorists and pedal-pushers.
The Tory leader's confession was only wrung out of him after The Mirror newspaper obtained film of him pedalling through red lights, going the wrong way around Keep Left bollards, and cycling across a pelican crossing when the light was red.
But the problem is much wider than that.
If you're a pedestrian and a car hits you, the car can be identified from its number plates; the driver will have had to pass a test of competence; the driver will have insurance, or be prosecuted if he hasn't; and if the driver is at fault, he can be banned from driving by a court.
Not so if you happen to be injured by a cyclist.
Bicycles are not subject to any kind of registration regime, so there's little chance that anyone could identify a bicycle involved in a hit-and-run.
Telling the police that the bike had two wheels and a frame is hardly going to help them find it, whereas it would be a piece of cake if they had to bear registration plates like every other type of vehicle.
That very anonymity is probably the main reason why cyclists like David Cameron feel free to break every rule in the Highway Code with apparent impunity.
Cyclists don't have to pass any kind of test, either. And while the Highway Code is full of rules that also apply to them, the lack of a regulatory regime means many cyclists never pick up a copy in their lives, never mind abide by it.
Cyclists don't have to have any kind of insurance, either. So if a cyclist hits you, perhaps riding along the pavement or the wrong way on a public road, you have no chance of receiving proper compensation.
Unless the cyclist happens to be an eccentric millionaire and is therefore worth sueing, hough I suspect that many of them are either too poor to afford a car or wish they were living in Victorian times when cycling seemed such a sensible idea.
If the cyclist is at fault, there is no chance whatever that the cyclist can be banned from cycling as a way of protecting the public. He could be penalised for being drunk in charge of a cycle, of course, but there is no such thing as a cycling ban.
It's frustrating enough that cycles are given priority at traffic lights in so many of our cities, but what makes it worse is when they ignore the cycle lanes we've all had to pay for and continue to wobble along in traffic, either forcing us to crawl at a snail's pace or tempting us to edge on to the other side of the road to overtake them, which must cause a fair number of accidents.
In Plymouth, for example, the council spent hundreds of thousands of pounds installing cycle lanes on the main road between the city and Tavistock, yet cyclists don't use the cycle lane and struggle up the hills on the main road, causing annoyance and disruption for motorists.
Surely cyclists should be forced to use cycle lanes where they exist and should be fined, heavily, if they use the roads instead. But with no number plates, how could they ever be identified and prosecuted?
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
