This was as empathetic as the mainstream British press got during Silly Season 2002, sparked by a proposed EU directive placing the blame for collisions on motorists by default unless proved otherwise. Then there was the Daily Mail...

Horribly, Britishly, Wrong
by Euan Ferguson

It's three in the afternoon, London is sweating like gelignite, Oxford Street is celebrating the first day of August by holding a special Festival of Stupidity, and I am being carved up by a pushchair. It happened 10 minutes into a riotously steep learning curve. You learn a lot, climbing on to a bike for the first time in 20 years. You learn little things you'd forgotten, happily so, about your buttocks. You learn large things: you learn that there may, in the end, be absolutely no hope for humanity.

The intolerance is astonishing. The cyclists hate the motorists, the motorists hate the cyclists, the pedestrians hate the cyclists and the cyclists loathe the pedestrians. And everyone, apparently, hates me. I, in turn, am fast becoming a little bundle of gently steaming misanthropy. I haven't gone as far as the Warsaw cyclist who a few years ago, overtaken by a city bus, climbed aboard at the next stop and bit the driver's genitals, but that's mainly because in this heat the level of groin-area care in the public-service sector is quite possibly even worse than in the Slavic countries, and also I can't catch up with the bus. It should have been so different. Around seven years ago London began taking bikes seriously. Cycle routes sprang up, and bikes got dispensation to whiz down bus lanes. We should all have been able to enjoy the happy co-existence of bike, motor and walker, albeit in a slightly smug and dangerously European way, but somewhere it all went horribly, Britishly, wrong.

The first thing you learn is to hate pedestrians. Certainly it's the cars that do most of the killing; 138 cyclists died on Britain's roads last year. But the pedestrians must drive up the stress to near-fatal levels. They gaze at you as you approach, blank-faced, blinking dully, like so many faintly startled guppies, then step out when you are precisely one metre away. They swarm across at the lights, even though you have right of way, simply because you are a bike; and so you sway your way through them and are roundly cursed. They barge into you, as you balance at a junction, with their pushchairs, and then turn and gaze at you with smouldering murderous hatred. The vehicles, honestly, were better. They at least seem to notice you. It can be disconcerting, hammering down the bus lane of the Euston Road, the hot breath of a Routemaster five feet from your aching buttocks, but you soon learn it's not monstrously dangerous, no one is actively looking to kill you, and you can begin to recognise the sound of a taxi changing down to overtake and twitch yourself further into the left to let him past.

The problem is not the moving traffic but the stationary stuff, plonked in the middle of cycle paths, red routes, bus lanes, and other traffic-management schemes complete with big signs saying, apparently, 'Do not, under any circumstances, even think of parking here, or you will completely and utterly get away with it.' Add the other hazards - boxes from a grocer's spread right across the cycle lane, a crowd of meandering ox-people staring at the sky trying to remember how to breathe - and it's no surprise cyclists break the rules. I know I did, about five minutes in. I tried to be good but it's just too tempting. Coming up to my second set of red lights I was behind two other cyclists and decided to take my cue from them; they sailed straight through, and so I followed with a guilty wobble. One then shot on to the pavement, performed a reverse-pike pirouette and shot up an alley, leaving a dozen shoppers scattered like buckshot.

This is another part of the problem. The cars and the pedestrians weren't enough; I began to hate other cyclists. Many are fine chaps, urbane and courteous, passing with a vague nod, sticking to the rules. But I also noticed a few loathsome ones. Big shaved legs, pumping Lycra, whistle clamped to thin lips to blast any children who have the temerity to walk on the pavement, banging their hands on the roofs of cars as they pass. One flashed past with a sneer as I snailed my way up a hill: more gears than the London Eye and a super-ergo-dynamic bottle of 'Fizzy Blue Healthy Revolting Iso-Nonsense', just for the five-minute hop to his silly branding agency. He was on and off the pavement all the way, and through every red light and zebra crossing, and I would have called him a name had I had any spare breath.

And then, suddenly, things were fine. Off the main roads it was lovely. I swooped around Islington's back streets, all with little cycle lanes pleasantly marked, and pootered along the canalside in the sun. Getting into my stride, I even timed myself, from work to home. The journey takes half an hour when walking: on the bike it took just six minutes, including a minor hiatus when I tried to cycle through the doors of Moorfields Eye Hospital. (There's a great cycle path running up to these doors from Old Street station, which turns out to be not a cycle path but a guide for blind people tapping their way from the station, so I'm sorry about the misunderstanding but there was really no need for that angry stuff with the sticks. Just because you've lost your sight doesn't mean you should lose your sense of humour!)

It would be great to think I could do it every day, but I know I won't. The stress and hatred is too much; pedestrians, motorists and cyclists will never get on. Partly, because we're simply too crowded, and London's transport system has been run for too long by people who are the name I tried to wheeze at the cyclist. The cyclists are partly to blame. If they obeyed the rules, waited at junctions, used little bells rather than loutish whistles, there would be greater coexistence; but they don't. For them, rules, like limbs, were made to be broken; and yet at the same time they're annoyingly smug and self-righteous about their eco-friendliness, and so we hate them, even when we're on bikes.

There's something else, as I realised in Oxford Street, even when walking down Oxford Street. There are two types of people: those who can walk down Oxford Street with a modicum of understanding that other people are walking down the same street, and who possess reasonable 20-20 vision and a rough intuitive grasp of spatial physics; and the ox-people. The same split comes on bikes and in cars; there are those who always notice others, and those who never ever will; and I'd like to say that never the twain shall meet, but too often that is precisely, suddenly, literally, what they do.