The Wardman Wire

Summer is well and truly here. It is official. We have had a couple of days of sun and no rain. And the bike rack at work is now overflowing with bikes.

Summer cyclists are the worst cyclists. Unlike people like myself who cycle every day - rain or shine, or even snow - these cyclists only emerge when the sun is shining. They are usually relatively unfit and/or have absolutely no understanding of how the road rules of cycling differs in practiality from that of driving. And so you get idiots who do things like cycle down the middle of the road for no reason.

There are two extremes of summer cyclist:

Type A: They have a brand spanking new bike, obviously barely a couple of weeks old. They wear every piece of safety equipment known to man, from helmet and hi-vis jacket to knee-pads, elbow pads, plastic goggles and masks to “protect them from the fumes”. And they wear huge amounts of lycra.

Type B: They use a rusty old bike, which is only removed from the garage a couple of months in the year. They have no safety equipment whatsoever and blithely ignore the traffic.

The problem is the same with both of these types. They’re not experienced on the roads. They don’t know the rules, or how to break them safely. They will drive past red lights without looking, assuming that cars will just break for them. They ride in the middle of the road because they want to or are just oblivious to the queue of traffic behind them. And they are just so slow!

Now, I’d be lying if I said I never ever did either of them - but I know when and how to do them. And I do them only when absolutely essential for my safety, which isn’t very often.

Another issue I have with them is that the sheer number of them always fill up the bike rack at the office, taking mine and the other regular’s places. Which is really annoying.

The problem is that these summer cyclists give the rest of us - actual cyclists - a bad name. We hate them as much as motorists do. If not more.