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On the morning of Monday, November 24th 2003, Frood and I looked out the window and saw that Winter had struck Devon well and truly. It was a matter of mutual agreement over the independently and immediately reached conclusion that it would be safer to take the car. Our road had frozen solid; one of the joys of living in the arse end of nowhere. Besides, Monday always seems to bring increased aggravation from drivers on the roads, and I had not quite got around to true-ing the rear wheel on Max, the mountain bike with the fat tyres. Taking the car means that bicycle and I are driven to whichever place of work is appropriate for the driver. For Frood, this means Alphington, at the south end of Exeter. I get out, bicycle is unshipped, I say cheerio to whomever did the driving and then hurtle off to work. Unloading at Alphington means riding out from Marsh Barton, past the Cattle Market, then up the hill to take the short section of dual carriageway (40mph limit) past the sewage treatment works at Countess Wear, over the lights-controlled roundabout, then a right about 250m up the inner bypass onto Old Rydon Lane. Here's a map (you want the one with the scale marked as 1000m at the bottom). We're largely talking the section between the Dawlish roundabout towards the bottom left and the next one where it says Countess Wear. The Cattle Market is in the next map section to the left, not shown. There is, as those of you who have been reading this site for a while or who live in the area will know, a relatively recently installed cycle path running between Exminster and Exeter. This comes in at the Dawlish roundabout, where the section of 50mph dual carriageway from the Cattle Market splits into the road to Dawlish and the road to Countess Wear and the Inner Bypass. It is a shared-use path, undelineated between peds and cyclists (not that delineation ever makes much difference, and can't, legally) with seven - count them, seven - conflict points, the requirement to cross the road three times, and the added bonus of being both a popular dog walking route and having other cyclists coming straight at you from the side as they leave the canal towpath route. Needless to say, paths aren't gritted, and I don't use this one for other safety reasons; including doing about 20mph up that stretch, which isn't safe on the pavement. It's much more fun to pile along the main carriageway. After all, it has two lanes and they are reasonably wide, so cars can get past easily enough: on the odd occasion they are moving and not stuck in a jam. Still, the ice is a major factor - the last thing you want is to take a spill on some ice and fall off the path into the road, thus doing something unexpected. That's when drivers are likely to hit you, when you're doing something unexpected. That morning I came speeding down off the hill into the left filter lane around the Dawlish roundabout. It's very wide there, and as I did so a red estate, new in appearance, went past me with plenty of space, the driver yelling through the passenger window "Get on the cycle path! " Ten seconds later I'd caught up with him, because the traffic ends up in long queues on that piece of road first thing in the morning. I stopped and knocked politely on his window. "Mind-boggling, people like you, " he said, without waiting for me to speak. "Should be on the cycle path. " "But they don't de-ice the path, " I said, reasonably. "But you're holding up traffic! " he complained. I looked up towards the Countess Wear roundabout, some quarter of a mile distant, cars packed nose to tail all the way. Behind us the jam stretched back towards the Dawlish roundabout. "How am I holding up traffic? " I asked him, standing, as I was, between the two stationary lines of cars, trucks, vans, lorries and buses. "You were holding up traffic back there! " he said, flustered, and he knew that was rubbish even as he said it. He'd overtaken me, after all. "Mind-boggling, you people, " he continued, unwilling to give up. "They put those paths in to keep you safe, and you don't use them. " And there, you see, we have the problem. Those paths don't keep us safe; people like to think they do. They like to think they do because it gives them an excuse to segregate us and get us out of their way. It seems obvious that we hold up traffic because we are physically slower than them. I can ride up Countess Wear at 20mph, but their cars are capable of doing 90mph, or 120, or 140. No matter that they sit in a jam doing about 5mph. My bike is a slower machine, therefore I must hold up traffic. They like to think that those paths keep us safe because then they have a humanitarian excuse for getting us off 'their' roads and out of their way. They won't listen to the vast reams of studies that show that paths do exactly the opposite. They don't want to hear that cyclists don't hold up traffic but are traffic; don't want to think about what congestion would be like if we were in cars rather than on bikes. And when, as some of us do, we ignore those paths and take the safe option by behaving like traffic, in a place where the drivers of motorised vehicles can see us, even though there is a path there, they get upset. Why? It's not just that we are there, on the road, in 'their' space, looking different, alien, more nimble and manoeuvrable: oh no. It's the waste of their tax money. They paid for that path; money from their taxes paid for that path, and I, and those like me, are spurning it. It's a slap in the face. It's like they have gifted us with this great thing and we turn around and spit on it. Their tax money is being wasted on unappreciative louts like me who don't know what's good for them. You know what? I resent my tax money being wasted as well. I didn't ask for the path. No one bothered to check with me. You know whom they asked? They asked the non-cyclists. They asked the people who drive everywhere because they think the roads are too dangerous because they wanted to install something that would make more people cycle. It hasn't really worked, although it has funnelled some existing cyclists into places where they can be counted more easily. What it does mean is that the people who think that the path is a great idea for cyclists now sit in their cars and get upset when someone dares to refuse to use it. I'm not dole scum or poor just because I choose to ride a bike. Each of my road bikes is worth more than a lot of the cars currently on the road. I pay taxes too. I paid for that path and I choose not use it, as is my legal right. Better get used to it. |