What should we learn from the Advertising Standards debacle?

I didn't cover Scottish Cycling's regressive, victim-blaming Niceway Code advertising campaign of last year at the time, partially because this is a London-focused blog and partially because many other bloggers gave it a good thrashing anyway (in fact it actually spawned new blogs and Twitter feeds that came into existence just to attack it), but mainly because it was the type of thing we get from time to time that goes away quickly, leaving the world no different for it ever having existed, so it didn't seem particularly worth while.

Four months after this dismal campaign ended, the affair came back in a new form. The wheels of the Advertising Standards Authority had turned slowly, and they had assessed the hundreds of complaints the Nice Way Code's dreadful adverts had generated. And they had decided to uphold one complaint (made by five separate people, apparently), with the effect that the absurd and dehumanising "Think Horse" commercial could not be broadcast again, despite the fact that Scottish Cycling had no intention of broadcasting it again, as the money for the campaign had run out long ago.

So a dreadful commercial was banned by the ASA. That's good. Except their reasons for banning it were crackers, based on ignorance of cycle safety, ignorance of accepted cycle training, and ignorance of the Highway Code, and, more worryingly still, showed ASA executing bizarre "mission creep", attempting to police the media according to their own completely arbitrary concepts of "Health and Safety", rather than sticking to their job of determining whether adverts are truthful or legal:

We considered that the scene featuring the cyclist on a road without wearing a helmet undermined the recommendations set out in the Highway Code. Furthermore, we were concerned that whilst the cyclist was more than 0.5 metres from the kerb, they appeared to be located more in the centre of the lane when the car behind overtook them and the car almost had to enter the right lane of traffic. Therefore, for those reasons we concluded the ad was socially irresponsible and likely to condone or encourage behaviour prejudicial to health and safety.

This set a terrible precedent, so suddenly cyclists were at the barricades again, this time defending Cycling Scotland's advert, with a massive campaign of emails, blogs and Tweets directed to getting the ASA to change their minds, that extended to MPs and attracted sympathetic comment even in the right-wing press.

The ASA's judgement was so obviously bonkers that it clearly could not stand, and it hardly lasted a day before they announced:

The ASA has withdrawn its formal ruling against a Cycling Scotland ad pending the outcome of an Independent Review. That followed a request from Cycling Scotland, in which it argued that the ASA’s criticism of the positioning of the cyclist was incorrect. The decision to withdraw was made by the ASA Chief Executive in light of a potential flaw in our ruling. Once the Independent Review process is complete we will publish our decision on our website.

This may or may not be the end of the matter. Roger Geffen of the CTC argues, with some justification, that

It would be wrong to start celebrating prematurely. 

It is noteworthy that the ASA’s announcement only references a "potential flaw" in their ruling on the cyclist’s road positioning, without mentioning their non-use of a helmet or other ‘protective equipment’. 

.....what if the ASA is looking to ‘save face’ by backing down on road-positioning, while sticking to their guns on helmets, citing the Highway Code Rule 59 in their defence? 

If we end up with the ASA imposing de facto censorship of helmet-free cycling on TV, that would be an appalling blow to the promotion of cycling as a safe, enjoyable, aspirational and (above all) perfectly normal way for people of all ages and backgrounds to get around for day-to-day journeys or for leisure.

Well it certainly would not be good. But I'd like to take a step back from all this agitation about one stupid and insulting advert.

For the initial crime was Cycling Scotland's anti-cycling Nice Way Code campaign. Just because they had one of their adverts struck down by people with even less idea of how to build a safe cycling culture than them did not make them into Good Guys worth in any way supporting or defending, and I'm not going to start doing that.

Furthermore, the whole furore around this just shows how far we are away from concentrating on what is important in building a safe cycling culture. That's physically building an environment where cycling works for anyone who wants to do it. Adverts and PR and image-making aren't actually all that important. They are a  side-show. Cycling in the Netherlands and Denmark does not work because everybody has the right attitudes, and cycling has the right image, it works because they have built the correct physical environment. The image is better there as well, yes, and attitudes are slightly different, but this follows from the engineering of the physical environment and the consequent democratisation of cycling. Britain at this particular historical period, however, has lost sight of her past engineering prowess, and since the 1980s has become obsessed with spin, advertising and image, thinking these more important, and this extends into the cycling world and is manifested in the attention given to this whole controversy. The energy directed into this would probably be better spent elsewhere: in campaigning for tangible change (as indeed LCC is doing with its Space for Cycling campaign).

Though I'm totally against the use of helmets for normal cycling, I've never discussed the subject here. Why? Because the whole subject generates more heat that it's worth. People can wear whatever they like. What I'm campaigning for is an environment so safe and so conducive to cycling that the suggestion that cyclists should normally wear helmets in that environment would be dismissed as absurd by any average person, as it is in the Netherlands. Just as the suggestion that people walking should normally wear helmets would be dimissed as absurd by any average British person now. I consider that we will get to that point through campaigning for infrastructure change, not by talking about helmets.

So infrastructure change remains resolutely my focus. We'll get the right attitudes when we have enough people cycling, that it's no longer in any way a niche activity, and we'll get that when conditions are subjectively safe enough, guaranteed by concrete infrastructure, not by hopes of good behaviour. Then the attitudes that ASA demonstrated in their ruling against Think Horse, as well as the attitudes enshrined in the Niceway Code campaign itself, will be as generally unacceptable as racism and homophobia.

In the present environment though, the conclusions that ASA came to first, before they rowed back, are perfectly understandable. They are, in a sense, correct; ASA is, or was, merely reflecting common understanding of how the roads should work with respect to bikes and motor vehicles. Their ruling showed up various pieces of hypocrisy not of their making, and therefore it is wrong to blame them wholly for it.

I wrote before of The problem with assertive cycling. My argument in that post was essentially that cycle training in the Bikeability sense embodies a lie, which puts cyclists "between a rock and a hard place". The lie exists in the fact that the government would never impose a statutory duty on motorists to overtake cyclists in the manner recommended by the Highway Code, and enforce that. Motorists would regard it as intolerable that they were held up by cyclists all the time, and always had to dawdle behind them, if they had to allocate them a whole lane, and change lane to overtake them.

The ASA were just interpreting practice on the road as they found it. We can shout and shout about how cyclists should be taking the primary position and motorists should have to change lane to overtake, but in the real world, most of the time, this does not and cannot happen. The road situation shown at 0:35 of Think Horse strikes me as hugely untypical: the width of the road, the lack of oncoming vehicles. the space available. The cyclist actually seems to have no reason to be riding so far from the kerb. It's not a realistic scenario, and has nothing to do with the problems I encounter every time I get on a bike in London, which are about how you get through without intimidation on multi-lane roads full of moving vehicles, or on parked-up residential streets that are effectively only one lane wide, and where nobody can overtake or pass anybody without squeezing through, and I'm not clear what anybody was ever supposed to learn from it. If they'd shown a realistic situation of conflict, where a motorist is forced to wait for a whole minute or two while a cyclist gets to the end of a road where safe overtaking is impossible, and told us what we are supposed to do there, that would have been different. But this is no help at all.

What's supposed to be going on here, and what is anyone supposed to learn from it?  0:35 from Think Horse

Someone in the ASA thought that this cyclist was in a funny position in the road (which, actually, they are) and thought it showed somebody doing something "socially irresponsible" (not that any car advert approved by ASA ever showed anyone doing anything socially irresponsible, of course). But this is just how most members of the public would probably regard it.

With the helmets issue, the problem lies more clearly with the Highway Code itself. This says cyclists should wear helmets. You and I know there is important distinction in the Code between places where it says should and places where it says must, but this will be lost on most people, and clearly was on the ASA adjudicators. There's a "common-sense" argument which could have run, in their minds: "The Highway Code says cyclists should wear helmets, therefore there must be some good reason for it to say that, therefore it must be unsafe and socially irresponsible of cyclists if they don't heed that advice, therefore we should ban this advert for that reason". There's a parallel here with the "not guilty" verdicts that juries often come up with in road death cases, that campaigners find deeply unacceptable. The actual purpose of juries is to take a "common-sense" view of the case, whatever that means, and in a car-oriented society, where the cyclist is regarded as a distinctly peculiar creature by most, and majority sympathy lies with the motorist, the result will be these miscarriages of justice that we see.

What's the real problem here? The problem is that the Highway Code mentions helmets at all, and uses this word should. The Highway Code should be clearer. It should be a set of rules that everyone must obey at all times on the public roads, punishable by law if they do not. It has no business getting into dubious behavioural recommendations, like helmets for cyclists, high-vis clothing for walkers or luminous leads for dogs. If Parliament wants those things to be law (which it does not), it should make them the law.  The Department for Transport should throw all the shoulds out of the Highway Code. Every one of the shoulds is just a way of transferring a little bit of blame on to those not responsible for road danger, but who suffer disproportionally from it. The shoulds, in their quasi-legal, quasi-rescriptive character,  just confuse the public, and ASA is merely reflecting that confusion. A great number of people, including me, would dispute that cyclists should wear helmets. There is a great raft of data and argument against it, so familiar, I am sure, to readers of this blog, that I will not go into it. I don't think it is particularly surprising that ASA are confused about this subject, which is not their speciality, when the DfT is so confused.

It's correct to point out, as CTC do in the link above, that ASA never try to enforce in advertising any of the other Highway Code shoulds, such as high-vis for pedestrains at night, and therefore they are clearly singling out cyclists for dicriminatory treatment. But clearly, also, there is no reason for all shoulds to be considered equal. It would probably appear as "common-sense" to the ASA adjudicators that clothing for pedestrains is just a matter of personal choice, but that there are serious safety issues invoved in the attire of anyone getting on a bicycle.

This is the sort of discrimination we have to combat, and, in the end, I suspect it will persist until we can normalise everyday utility cycling into British society. This can't happen until we get a massive re-engineering of our roads and streets such that it ceases to be the case that the only pleasant and practical way to use them is in a motor vehicle. I can't get too het up about the banning (or not) of one silly advert based on an argument between two sets of people, both of whom have regressive attitudes. Let's put the effort into getting real change of the streets. So often I hear people say, "We need to change the attitudes now, as it will take too long to get decent infrastructure in". Well, it only seems to take a long time to get decent infrastructure in because we never really start. Getting that start should be the focus of our efforts.

Dressed for war: cause and effect

Boris Johnson was returned as Mayor of London on 3 May with a 3% lead over his nearest challenger, Ken Livingstone. Two prominent Conservative Assembly Members and allies of Johnson lost their seats: Brian Coleman, who represented Barnet and Camden, and had been Chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, and Richard Barnes, who represented Ealing and Hillingdon, and had been Deputy Mayor. Cyclists will be pleased at the removal of Coleman, who was famously anti-cycling. (Unfortunately for cyclists in Barnet, he remains Barnet Council's Cabinet Member for Environment.) Things did not go so badly for Conservatives in the assembly election as it had been thought they might, and, with nine Conservative seats on the Assembly, more than one third the total, Boris Johnson should still get his budgets through for the next four years (and the activities in the Assembly will be essentially irrelevant).

I'm therefore not expecting any major changes in roads policy in London over the next four years. The first test of intention will be the outcome of the reviews of "50 key junctions" on the existing Cycle Superhighways and "150 major junctions" on the other roads controlled by Transport for London. The kind of changes to the roads that these reviews come up with, or do not come up with, will show whether there is anything at all in Johnson's endorsement of LCC's Go Dutch campaign. The timetable for the reviews remains worryingly unclear, and "any junction improvements will be delivered after the 2012 Games". The exception is Bow roundabout (where two cyclists died on Superhighway 3 within weeks of one another last year), where unknown (to me) "improvements" will be carried out before the Games. So the first indication of the character of Johnson's new-found Dutchness will be seen at Bow. Indications are it won't be "Dutch" at all.

But here's something that amused me, because like the best satires, it is about 70% true: a cartoon drawn by Bianca Ansems, a Dutch artist who is living in England, but who dares not cycle here. She's tried but she says she's been honked at and hit by cars despite following all the rules – well, welcome to the club. She captioned this picture In England, cycling is not leisure...IT IS WAR!!

Cartoon by Bianca Ansems

Yes folks, this is how the typical British cyclist looks to a Dutch person. And it's pretty accurate, down to the little details: note even the almost-LCC cycle campaigner's badge. And I don't blame British cyclists one bit for looking like this. They look different to Dutch cyclists because the conditions they experience are totally different. The gear is a rational and correct response to the environment. You need the folding bike because space for full-sized bikes is so short on our trains, and non-existent on other public transport, and there is so little secure parking, and so much theft. You need the maintenance equipment because friendly bike stores that will fix you up in a trice if you have a puncture or other fault are fairly few and far between, and our roads and cycle paths are strewn with glass and full of holes, thus giving bikes a hard time. You need the noise-making gadgets to counter the army of the "cyclists are the silent foe" pedestrain brigade, who don't bother looking left and right when crossing the road if they cannot hear a motor. You need to be brightly visible to the ridiculous "Nth degree", because the Highway Code suggests this, and if you are unfortunate enough to be knocked down and injured, you need to minimise your chances of being told by a stupid old judge that "you had only yourself to blame for not being conspicuous enough" and that therefore you deserve to have your injury compensation sum decimated. A similar argument goes for the helmet. You join a campaiging organisation and wear its badge because conditions are so atrocious, but you can see how they could so easily be much better with slightly different public policy, so you want to spread that message. The knee pads are going a bit far: I don't see many London cyclists wearing these, but then satire has to be about 30% untrue to be funny.

So it is important to understand that the way our cyclists look, and behave, is a consequence of, and a reaction to, the conditions in which they find themselves, not a contributory cause of those conditions.

There is a blogger known as Amcambike*, who lives in the Netherlands, and writes about cycling. He does not let his true identity be directly known, but I believe him to be a British or Irish expatriate, as his written English is perfect, showing no trace of foreign inflexion. I believe him to be the same person as "Paul", to whom I referred in this post last July. There is correspondence from "Paul" there, whose nonsense I grew tired of trying to contradict, and thereafter I have not published his comments on my blog (one of only two people I have taken that decision over). "Paul", or "Amcambike", appears to be actually one Paul Treanor, whose politico-philosophical writings are to be found here, because Paul Treanor's suggested cycle routes in the Amsterdam area are the same as Amcambike's. You venture into Treanor's politico-philosophical writings at your own peril (amongst other crazy things, he argues that sustainability is wrong, and art should be destroyed).

In his Amcambike blog, his mission is to convince us that there is no point in us in the UK, or other countries, trying to emulate Dutch cycling policies, because he believes they will not work, and he believes they have not worked in the Netherlands either. He often quotes my writings (in order to contradict them), and his posts have in the past gained approving comment from a prominent member of London Cycling Campaign, who opposed the adoption of Going Dutch. He tends not to publish comments from those who disagree with him, but Cyclefisk has rebutted him on a couple of occasions.

Amcambike rarely ventures into direct commentary on events in the UK, but he did put up a post on 30 April attacking the riders on the LCC Big Ride, saying that, through how they dress, and the type of bicycles they ride, they bring about the hostile cycling conditions in London. This is of course like saying that umbrellas cause rain. After that, Joe Dunckley (@steinsky on Twitter) commented how amusing it was that Amcambike, in attacking the totality of London cyclists, was attacking even the cyclists who look to him for confirmation of their views, the anti-Dutch-infrastructure brigade. Amcambike subsequently deleted that blog post. He has replaced it with another one published on May 5, again featuring The Big Ride, this time slightly less stridently attacking London cyclists for the way they dress:

Even allowing for the fact that it was a demonstration, and that some people got dressed up for the occasion, cycling clearly means something different in London. It is treated as an urban sport or fitness activity, rather than a means of transport. That is ironic, because the Big Ride was intended to promote Dutch-style cycling policies.

Of course this is the most total rubbish.  Most of the cyclists on the Big Ride were not "dressed up for the occasion", they were dressed in rainwear, because it was raining. Most of the rainwear sold to cyclists in the UK is yellow or orange. That's a choice of the manufacturers and a consequence of the culture described above: it is reflected in the Highway Code, a government document having the force of law, which strongly encourages cyclists (and pedestrians, horses and dogs) to be dressed like this: part of the perverse culture of so-called "road safety" as opposed to "road danger reduction". It has little or nothing to do with how cyclists want to look and seem. So nothing on The Big Ride was showing that "cycling clearly means something different in London [compared to Amsterdam]". It doesn't mean something different. What does cycling "mean" anyway? For someone who writes on political philosophy, Treanor makes a remarkable number of category mistakes or semantic errors.

The Big Ride showed the reverse of what Treanor claims, that London cycling "means something different" or "is a different type" to that found in Amsterdam. It showed the huge demand for good conditions for transport cycling in London from cyclists, and people who would like to ride bikes regularly, of all types. It thus showed the demand for conditions more like those Dutch cyclists enjoy. Treanor's final stupid comment is:

It is hard to imagine a demonstration of this kind in Amsterdam. It is also hard to understand the relevance of Dutch cycle infrastructure for the type of cycling which appears to be common in London.

It is even harder to imagine a demonstration by thousands of cyclists in Amsterdam calling for "Cycling to be made as nasty and dangerous as it is in London".  But in the parallel universe of Amcambike, perhaps even this is not too strange a possibility to contemplate.

*Update: following publication of this post, on 9 May 2012, the Amcambike blog was deleted by its author.

LCC gets the wrong image

I have been unusually complimentary about the London Cycling Campaign recently, agreeing with its statements and praising its doings (except for the new logo and website design which I have criticised as looking like something to do with giving blood). So... now to redress the balance. Ha.

The cover of this month's London Cyclist magazine is terrible. It projects all the wrong messages about London cycling. I showed it to my partner, and she agreed with me: it looks aggressive. Everything about the picture is wrong. The bike is wrong, the bloke is wrong, the clothes are wrong, the shades are wrong, the pose is wrong, the angle is wrong, the background is wrong, the sky is wrong. It's totally the wrong image for a campaign devoted to promoting urban utility cycling for all. It's technically a good photograph, but a very bad photograph for the purpose.

The image reinforces all the worst stereotypes of cycling being about macho men dressed in special clothes racing about on slick, pricey, non-utility bikes. What LCC should have done, which they rarely do, is to use a picture which is topical to current campaigns or to concerns of cyclists in London. So, cycling on Blackfriars Bridge would have been and ideal subject, or, more positively, in the City, the City having shown some sign of adopting pro-cycling policies recently.

The reason they have used this picture is because it accompanies their article on testing "road bikes", That's sports cycling jargon, which means, for the uninitiated, racing bikes. But that's not explained, it's assumed knowledge. Inside, it says:

Generally regarded as the lightest and nippiest of rides, a good road bike will serve as commuter workhorse during the week and sportive warrior at the weekend. 

Will it really? No mudguards, lights or rack. Is that really a useful bike for the typical commuter? I'm not going to go all Dutch-fundamentalist on this. I don't insist on a chain guard, dynamo, integral locking, skirt guard, and impossible-to-tip-over stand. But I would like something more than a bare-bones bike appropriate to doing a time trial on to be promoted as a good "commuter workhorse".

I have long wondered why the UK bike trade insists on trying to provide the wrong bikes to virtually everybody except a few cycle sport enthusiasts. Surely they should be able to see what side their bread should be buttered. Surely they should be able to see that the market for practical general-purpose bikes should be vastly larger than that for specialist sports machines. But they stubbornly go on trying to market the wrong products for the usage to which most people wish to put bikes. I really think this is a significant factor in the failure of the UK to achieve a real cycling culture.

But, apart from all that, this bloke on this bike does sit oddly next to the cover headlines, particularly the "20's Plenty" campaign. OK, what he is riding and what he is wearing is not important, he is a cyclist, that is the main thing, therefore part of the solution to the UK's transport problems. But if you are going to have a campaign message about the desirability of creating slower, more liveable streets, I just don't think it helps to use an aggressive image that seems to be about sport and speed. It will not help "win friends and influence people" outside cycling's current ranks.*

This is almost as bad (but not as ludicrous as) Brent Council's attempt at promoting its cycling credentials on this page where it advertises its winning a paltry £300, 000 of "Biking Borough" funding from TfL:

Brent Council has won funding of just under £300,000 from Transport for London (TfL) to develop and promote cycling in the borough. Brent Council has a target to increase cycling from just over one per cent currently to two per cent by 2014, and a further three per cent by 2026.

Cycling has health and environmental benefits for the borough and is already a high priority in the council's Sports and Physical Activity Strategy. The council submitted a funding application request in March and has been awarded £294,500 under the Biking Boroughs scheme. 

As part of the GLA's commitment to cycling, Biking Boroughs aims to encourage people to cycle more in outer London. TfL hopes this will be achieved through, for example, improvements to roads and facilities, cycle training, better security and cycle promotion.

This text lies under this amazing image, which I have not altered in any way:

This is their image of "biking" in the "Biking Borough". Is this meant to represent cycling on the North Circular Road? Why are the cyclists squashed, with non-round wheels? Are they going so fast that effects of relativistic physics are taking hold, with distance being contracted in the direction of their motion relative to the observer? (In fact, no, the distortion is the wrong way.) Cycling at close to the speed of light would indeed be a good way in which cyclists could ensure their own safety on the North Circular. Perhaps it is the only way to do it. In this way cyclists could ensure they had got all round before the motorists had even seen them, as the motorists would be seen frozen in time, virtually unmoving, in the cyclists' frame of reference. And if a collision did occur, the motor vehicle would come off very much the worse, what with the relativistic mass factor gain the cyclist would achieve at near light-speed, giving him a huge momentum. He would just slice through the car.

Well, I can laugh at Brent Council's webmasters, because they are amateurs (when it comes to cycling). After all, they see so few ordinary cyclists in Brent, particularly in north Brent, where the council offices all are located, that they could be forgiven for not knowing what one looks like. But LCC should know what it is doing with these things. Look at, by contrast, the images the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain has been using on its website.

The At War with the Motorist blog is on about the same thing:

None of this is to denigrate racing cycling and mountain biking and the people who enjoy those activities. I am merely indifferent to them, just as the average car driver has no interest in formula one, and the average pedestrian would guess that “bagging a munro” has something to do with the waste products of canine digestion. Only with bicycles do you get magazines that put a feature about olympic athletes next to a news item about commuter infrastructure. And that’s all part of the problem.

It is indeed. The word "cycling" in English, unfortunately, means simultaneously two completely different things: the sporting activity, and the mode of transport. The same is not true of the words "driving" or "motoring". The confusion this engenders in the mind of what used to be called, back in the days when printing was black and white, "the layman", is very sad. It really holds back utility cycling in the English-speaking world. Utility cycling in the English-speaking world needs to keep explaining itself. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, getting the pictures wrong makes that task a thousand times harder.

*This paragraph is a change to the one I originally wrote which caused some, justified, criticism, in the comments.

A grey protest for a greener city?

There has been, as readers of cycling blogs, websites and Twitter feeds based in London will know, a lot of frustration and anger around at TfL's intransigence over the Blackfriars Bridge re-design. So far, protests from everybody from ordinary cyclists to London Assembly Members have not achieved the results we want. There are various shades of opinion amongst cyclists on what exactly they do want. For these, see earlier posts in this blog, or many posts in Cyclists in the City or Cycle of Futility. All are agreed, however, that cyclists, the majority traffic on the bridge at peak times, do not want what TfL are offering, which is raising of the speed limit to 30mph, an increase in the number of general vehicle lanes, and maintenance of the dangerous design of the junction at the north end of the bridge, which has cause two deaths and additional serious injuries in recent years.

Thanks to the efforts of those campaigners shown in the YouTube video posted here yesterday, the issue has now gone closer to the top of government, with cycling transport minister Norman Baker promising to talk to TfL, though he has no control over them. While we wait to see if this, and LCC's photo petition, achieve anything, naturally there has been much discussion amongst cycling bloggers on what further direct action can be taken to keep up the pressure. There was a "flashride" protest on 20 May, where 300 people cycled slowly across the bridge with "20mph" signs, round the junction, and then to the TfL headquarters. Organised quickly by LCC through social media sites, this showed what can be done.

I have been mulling this over, in the context of other cycling events that have occurred in London recently, the Tweed Run and the World Naked Bike Ride, and think I have come up with a concept that merges all these. The idea is to keep doing a Flashride on Blackfriars Bridge, every week at the same time. Publicise it so it grows bigger and bigger. But the "gimmick" would be that it would be the reverse of the Naked Bike Ride; rather than looking whacky, as most cycle protests do, it would emphasise the normalisation of cycling: everybody on it would be dressed in business suits. Not fancy dress, not Boris Johnson wigs, just straight, serious, everybody in formal suits.

Because this is a movement starting in the heart of London, the City of London, no less, at Blackfriars Bridge (but which could grow) give it a distinctively City of London feel. Emphasise that fact that cyclists are not scruffy, left-wing, homespun veggie types, but concentrate on the new face of cycling, the mainstreaming of it; establish an idea that cycling is the new establishment method of transport, not a fringe activity carried out by fringe-types. So we combine a protest on the specific issues at Blackfriars and the specific attitudinal problems in TfL with a general media assault on the image of cycling.

Danny (Cyclists in the City) wrote recently:

When I have met Conservative opinion leaders and politicians and when I have sat down banging my head on the table (virtually) opposite the many conserative (smaller c) councillors in the City of London, they have tended to type-cast cyclists as left-wingers, not part of their core constituency, not 'people like us'. 

What I think neither the Conservatives in the London Assembly nor most of the Members (councillors) in the City of London realise is that their transport agenda is alienating a sizeable slice of people you might consider to be the Tories's core constituents: People who work in the Square Mile, who might live in the more prosperous parts of London and might own an SUV or two. These are the same people who book black cabs to get home after a gruelling deal into the middle of the night.

And as one of the respondents to this post wrote:

Yeah, Mr Johnson – like me. Partner in a big 4 accounting firm, resident of leafy Surrey market town, wouldn’t blink at spending over a grand on a bike, own a landrover and a convertible, clean-shaven, don’t own a pair of sandals, meat-eater, take foreign holidays, sometimes by air.

Why would you want to alienate me just because, partly for convenience, partly health benefit, and partly a deeply buried green conscience, I prefer to get around London on a bike?

This is the message we need to get to Boris and other politicians. This movement is middle-class, middle-England and mainstream. Even if we are not middle-class, middle-England and mainstream, we can pretend to be. Now, while I think it would be great if we could have a different kind of really broad pro-cycle and pro-pedestrian protest movement in the UK, equivalent to the Dutch "Stop the Child Murder" campaign of the 1970s, and maybe that will come in time, I don't think we are at that stage yet. I would love get all the mothers and young children of Barnet massed outside the Town Hall in Hendon baying for Brian Coleman's blood and demanding safe streets for the kids to cycle on, but I can't see that happening for a while. No, in London, at the present stage, we need need to work with what we have got, and we need to do something different and distinctive: distinctive to the place that is the City of London, claimed financial capital of the world.

The advantages of my idea are that it would be stereotype-busting, and memorable, and media-friendly. It would be repeatable, and exportable (other cities could copy it). It would be it's own "brand", as the Tweed Run is. Its deliberately grey image would not only confront social stereotypes about cyclists, but also the victim-blaming "cyclists need to dress as high-vis Christmas trees to remain safe" mentality. This would be normalising cycling dress with a City flavour.

Now I can see some practical problems. Those who commute a long way may find it hot or impractical to cycle in formal clothing, but maybe they could keep part of it in panniers and partially change before the protest. Maybe some people could get to work first and change there. One could allow compromises, the uniformity needn't be prefect, cycle helmets could be allowed, but even so, we could still create a new, unexpected image for a cycle protest.

As protesters, we shouldn't be afraid of causing a level of inconvenience and disruption to London. This is a a just cause. People die because this stuff is not right. That's what we are protesting about. Not like the selfish London Taxi Drivers Association, threatening to bring London to a standstill over the issue of their exclusion from the Olympic Road Network in 2012, which is just a protest about private, commercial interest. Cyclists are now standing up (actually, sitting down) for their own rights, plus those of pedestrians, and of the great mass of people who want to cycle on London's streets but can't, because of the appalling conditions. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and decades of timid and deferential cycle campaigning have not got us very far.


"A grey protest for a greener city." Who's up for it?