Ninja Cyclists - For goodness sake, take some personal responsibility!

In my standup set earlier this year I had a piece about ninja cyclists. At the time I thought it was an original idea, but I now find the term coined in the urbandictionary. Fortunately I had the same definition ie someone who spends all day stripping any reflective surface off their bike then dressing in dark clothes goes out after dark. They then career down the road expecting everyone else to get out of their way in the belief that our bat-senses will detect their approach without any aid from lights or warning sounds.

The relevance today is the convergence of two things. The first was the continuing debate triggered by a number of recent deaths of cyclists - 6 in London alone I think. The second was the fact that yesterday evening (after dark) I drove through London from Elephant & Castle and out through Tottenham and Enfield via the City. I was listening to LBC and, yes, the debate was about who was to blame for the carnage on the roads. Drivers blamed cyclists and cyclists blamed drivers.

When I am in London I am usually walking or using public transport so the road debate washes over me. It is extremely rare these days that I drive in London, let alone after dark, but last night I experienced first hand the "Ninja Cyclist". I will admit that what I say next is mostly irrelevant to daytime road use, but I will let the reader decide what parallels they can draw.

My point is that it is clear that most evening cyclists seem to have no awareness or no care of how difficult they are to see at night. I found myself looking out for cyclists' lights and really struggling to spot them. Many had no front light just a tiny blinking red dot the size of a dog's eye that was often attached to a backpack or a jacket and so was not always clearly visible even if you stood directly behind them. Some just a had a front light that was about as effective as a miners' lamp powered by a candle and NO back light and a number had not light at all that I could locate.

Few had light coloured clothing let alone anything reflective or hi-visibility. This meant that often the best way to spot them was by the absence of other light as they physically blocked the head lamps of oncoming cars. A bit like spotting a black hole in space - ie by what is not there, rather than what is.

I also suspect that the shift to orange streelights has not helped as it seems to lower the clarity of images at night.

On top of this I encountered cyclists riding three(!) abreast, presenting me with three shadows to track. I don't recall any of them attempting to signal their intended manouvres, leaving me to guess their likely movements and then I found them squeezing between gaps that I would struggle to walk through.

My conclusion was that the vast majority of cyclists out last night were not helping themselve at all. While sitting in my car I did not feel physically threatened, I did feel pyschologically threatened fearing that should there be a clash with a cyclist, they would certainly come off worse, yet I would probably still be blamed.

I wonder of those cyclists have any idea how difficult they make life. I am pretty sure that if I drove in London more I would invest in one of those video cameras to try keep a record of the world that I see as a driver.

At the end of the day London's roads were not designed for the weight or mix of traffic it carries, but for goodness sake these Ninja cyclists really must take some personal responsibility, else the mortalities will continue to mount.