Let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to raise the ire of the Australian public when it comes to cyclists.

Despite tougher laws against cyclists, the fact that realistically we’re looking at one bad cyclist article every 3-4 months or so and that every second day there’s a slew of bad motorist articles in every paper nationwide, the Australian media still love to run stories vilifying all cyclists when incidents occur.

Case in point, the recent altercation in NSW between bus driver and cyclist.

So the story goes the cyclist was travelling illegally down a transit lane, I think the Victorian equivalent are those big red bus lanes we have down Punt Road and Victoria Parade. In any case a bus came up behind him and overtook the cyclist. NSW police have since released footage, what you want to pay attention to is the box on the bottom left:





After the pass the bus then pulled up at some traffic lights where the cyclist banged on the bus, broke a mirror, entered the bus and then took a swing at the driver.

Let me just be upfront about it and say there is no defense for the above behaviour. It doesn’t matter if the guy was on a bike, a car or a pogo stick – the police need to find him, charge him and send him to jail.

I don’t know what his reasons were and I don’t care. As a fellow cyclist I’m quite happy to offer this person up to the wolves to take responsibility for his actions. There’s just simply no defense.

Now, had the offender been using any other form of transport this would have been a one page news article and forgotten about the next day. Because he was on a bicycle however, once again the media blogosphere has been set alight with rallying articles that serve no purpose then to further reinforce those that believe the roads exist for themselves.

As Miranda Devine puts it;

Bikes and pedestrians are allowed on to roads only under the good graces of motorists, and only when they do not pose a traffic hazard.


Uh really? And please, before anyone trots out the ‘but I pay car rego which pays for the roads arguments’ it’s already a well established fact that car rego barely covers the administration costs of licensing itself.

Less then $200 of a car registration is actually for the registration, I mean really do you honestly think this is even remotely enough to cover all those projects with blue signs advertising the fact that whatever they happen to be doing will cost taxpayers XX millions of dollars?

Not even close.

Miranda continues;

The ideologues who have fostered the road-sharing lie must think a few dead cyclists and pedestrians are a small price to pay for getting cars off the road, because that is their ultimate aim: to make driving so unpleasant, slow, expensive and fraught with hazards that motorists give up.


Riiiight.

With exploding populations, a lack of foresight and increased amounts of cars on the road, cyclists really don’t even factor in to making driving unpleasant, slow or expensive. And as for hazards, well if changing a lane is a hazard for you (any motorist (myself included) will tell you it is for a lot of people) then I think it’s time to go back to licensing school.

Or to put it simply;

City of Sydney data show that in 2007 only five crashes involving cyclists and cross traffic occurred at traffic-light controlled intersections within the City of Sydney, while 151 crashes involved motor vehicles.


In Melbourne for example, we’ve only got so many major roads leading into the CBD and a seemingly ever increasing amount of people who want to drive everywhere. As such I’m always amazed at the hypocrisy of people complaining about the ten seconds or so it should take to overtake a cyclists while they happily spend a few hours (some a ridiculous amount of hours) trapped in their cars sitting in gridlock each week.

Sure cyclists are a convenient visual scapegoat but really, there’s a finite capacity to our roads and currently cyclists or no cyclists, during peak hour most of Melbourne and Sydney’s roads are already well beyond capacity.

In a similar vein Michelle Cazzulino wrote;

But in the hierarchy of evil road users, there is one variety of beast that ranks higher than bus drivers, P-platers and clock-racing truckies alike.

Cyclists.


You can read the article from the link above but the opening paragraphs pretty much set the tone. Cazzulino just pulls out every cyclist stereotype available and adds her personal seal of dissaproval. She even feigns worry over a ‘twitter campaign’ against Magda Szubanski after her comments on national television encouraging motorists to open their doors onto cyclists as they drove past.

Not to be outdone by the cyclist hating females of Australia (what is it with Australian females, the media and anti-cyclist commentary?), John Birmingham “lightheartedly” draws the comparison betwen cyclists and terrorists.

The enemy now walks amongst us, or rather it rides, with occasional stops to dismount from its wretched bicycle to beat up innocent bus drivers. Of course I speak of cyclists.


Once again all cyclists are painted as law breaking insane hoons.

Perhaps it is the difficulty in being able to distinguish from two people on a bicycle that causes people to instinctively confuse them all with being the same person. After all, bicycles are nowhere near the size of cars and don’t come in such obvious differentiating colours, and of course we all dress the same too.

Random lycra condom outfits are mandatory with purchase of a bike. Some stores won’t let you leave with your new bike unless a clothing purchase is made.

Now I could just go on and be as silly as the three attention seeking examples above (I’m not naive in pretending to not understand from a commercial media perspective why they write what they write), or simply ask the question why every time the much more frequent motorist loon doesn’t nearly attract so much attention.

Even within motoring ranks themselves there’s quiet dissention. Car owners hate motorbike riders, four wheel drive owners are routinely seen as deathtraps on wheels for anyone they smash into and every driver has a ‘near miss’ or story about truck drivers.

Yet these motoring categories, despite the thousands of annual traffic infringements, horror smashes, hooning and death tolls will all put their internal squabbles aside and happily unite in a crusade against cyclists.

Every major city around the world has learnt to deal with cyclists. From the 3rd world Asian countries to the cycling meccas of Europe even to America; the land of SUV’s and Hummers.

More often then not, encourage their use and gradually ween people off cars. Take New York City for example, in comparison Australia’s choked roads are a high speed freeway to the frequent gridlock in New York.

Yet despite this a strong cycling culture exists and what’s more the government is 100% behind them. The video below illustrates the level of commitment to cycling in what is one of the most traffic heavy cities in the world.





Progressively speaking bicycles aren’t going anywhere yet as a viable method of transport Australia continues to lag behind the rest of the world by a good few decades. Not only in facilities but in societal attitude.

Petrol isn’t going to get cheaper and roads aren’t going to get anymore congested and I think it’s high time as a country we accept that.

Related posts that might interest you:

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2. WARNING: Biggest threat to cyclists in Taiwan emerges
3. It's time to address Victoria's massive rogue cyclist problem
4. TV show Californication portrays bicycle road rage
5. Motorcycles and scooters want to use our bike lanes