I don’t jump red lights. I wait impatiently at them, hopefully in the bike box if this isn’t filled by cars and mopeds. It is, of course, an offence, and contravenes the Highway Code, so red light jumping is no way endorsed by Cycling Weekly, but is it really a problem the police should be focusing on?
The City of London Police clearly think so. In a press release on Thursday morning, the Square Mile’s force announced that in the ten months since last July, it had given out 944 fixed penalty notices to cyclists for going through red lights.
“The majority of cyclists are safe and obey the Highway Code, however, we are educating, engaging and where necessary enforcing those road users who go through red lights, putting themselves and pedestrians at risk,” Commander Umer Khan of the City of London Police said.
The press release insists that “the enforcement of cycling offences has not meant that the force has taken its focus from road traffic offences by drivers”, which it admits have a higher rate of causing death or serious injury. Surely some amount of resource, though, has been taken away from another part of their policing operation to go into catching cyclists opting to go through red lights.
It screams of an initiative prompted by the endless culture war of cyclists vs drivers; the motorists who shout loudly “what about them?” when confronted by their own wrongdoing, which has a higher potential to seriously harm. Penalising a thousand cyclists for a minor infraction is unlikely to make our roads much safer.
As I said, I’m not a red light jumper. I don’t want to break the law, for one, or give another reason for cyclists to be vilified, or to incur the wrath of a driver who could cause me serious injury within a second.
However, I do understand those that do. Sometimes, it is safer for a cyclist to pass through a junction than to get caught up in the motor vehicles snarled up before it. A bicycle passing through is unlikely to be as big a danger as a lorry.
It would be all too easy to indulge in whataboutery. Every day I see cars, vans and lorries sail through red lights, but it is cyclists who are blamed and called out, because this is much easier than dealing with the deeply buried problems of private car culture. Any attempt to curb driving is seen as a threat to freedom, and any attempt to encourage cycling is a threat to driving, and therefore a threat to freedom.
My recent trip to Amsterdam showed me the delights of a city where cyclists were prioritised at almost every junction, and how free flowing the whole thing could be. The UK is such a long way behind this, partly due to infrastructure, but mostly due to a culture that is overwhelmingly pro-motorist.
While the City of London Police should be applauded for trying to make roads safer, it feels like they’re targeting the wrong thing by going after minor cycling infractions. Seven cyclists died in Greater London in 2022, the last time official figures were released. With fewer cars or at least safer roads, we can imagine a world where this number could be zero.
Action is needed on dangerous driving, on illegal e-bikes with throttles and insane speeds, on mobile phone use at the wheel and on speeding. Compared to these, going through a red light on two wheels feels relatively minor.
