One Rule For You

It is easy to paint all members of any given group with the same brush if a small, unrepresentative element among them behave badly. It was too easy (and lazy) back in the 1970s, to condemn all football fans for the hooliganism that a minority indulged in at football matches, and the anti-social behaviour of some fans on trains and in town centres on Saturday afternoons.

 

Badly behaved British holidaymakers in Spanish resorts, and so-called ‘lager louts’ in town centres up and down Britain are equally unrepresentative of the majority of Britons who holiday abroad, or enjoy an evening out in this country. By the same token, we should not consider all of Britain’s cyclists together as an arrogant, ignorant and anti-social, Highway Code ignoring, lumpen mass – but sometimes it is difficult not to.

 

I suppose that it is a combination of confirmation bias and the frequency illusion that gives the impression that all cyclists are ‘Lycra-clad louts,’ as they are sometimes dubbed – not that all cyclists wear Lycra -  and in fact, where I have a problem with cyclists, it is less with the Lycra-clad among them, who at least seem to confine themselves to the road, even if they do sometimes ignore the rules.

 

My biggest bug-bear with cyclists are those who ride their bikes where it is expressly prohibited, and if challenged, are not only unapologetic, but downright affronted, displaying the increasingly common trait of exceptionalism.

A week or so ago, Val and I were in Eastbourne for the Finals of the Viking International Tennis, and as we always do when we visit Eastbourne – and most other seaside towns we go to – we love to walk along the promenade. Eastbourne has a particularly fine promenade, and along the two-and-half miles from Holywell in the west to Fisherman’s Green in the east, cycling is prohibited. West of Fisherman’s Green, pedestrians and cyclists each have their own dedicated lane along the prom to the end, by the water treatment works.

 

The prom at Eastbourne, marked in red.

There are of course, signs on lampposts and painted on the footway indicating that cycling is prohibited. These are flagrantly ignored and in one walk we took, we were passed by nearly a dozen bike riders.

 

Recently, notices have appeared on a couple of lampposts reiterating the ban on cycling, however these are hidden away quite discreetly and virtually invisible to the cyclists that whizz by them. It doesn’t help that as well as being hard to see, the signs contain an invalid URL for the local council (it should read byelaws, not bylaws), and the website for reporting anti-social behaviour to the police is so convoluted and user-unfriendly that many people must be deterred from trying to report the matter.

That notice, complete with mis-spelling of 'bye-laws.'

Getting more and more annoyed as we were passed by more and more cyclists, we decided to ask some of them why they were cycling in an area where it is prohibited. Most totally ignored us, and one or two just laughed. One said he wasn’t cycling because he was riding an electric bike, and one asked why we were bothered, as it was 7am and there were few people about. He got very upset when we took a photo of him.

Cyclists on the prom.

There have also been a good number of people riding e-scooters up and down the prom, and while the prohibition on cycling does not specifically mention e-scooters, riding them anywhere other than on private property is illegal, and police recently confiscated over 500 e-scooters (which are subject to all the same legal requirements such as MOT, tax, and licensing as cars and other vehicles) in London. What makes it particularly galling is that on the north side of Grand Parade (which runs parallel to the prom), cyclists are allowed to ride on the pavement; they presumably prefer the view of the sea that one gets from the prom.

 

You may think that given the name of my blog, which comes from the concept that rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men, that I would be more forgiving, especially since you could argue that a cyclist riding on an almost deserted prom at 7am is doing little harm. Except that my attitude towards being guided by rules is that the person doing so should be circumventing, or even ignoring them for the benefit of others not themselves. They should be using discretion in applying the rules to avoid unintended consequences that disadvantage others; it does not mean blithely ignoring rules that are an  inconvenience, or which they simply do not like.

 

In 2020, the Eastbourne Herald reported that a Freedom of Information request showed that no fines or warnings had been issued to cyclists in the previous two years. In that article, a spokesman for Eastbourne Council was quoted as saying, " Our Neighbourhood First officers do their best to engage with anyone not abiding by the no-cycling signs and explain why it is a pedestrianised area." You will excuse my scepticism on that score.

 

No doubt the police and the council would cite a lack of resources for the lack of enforcement of the bye-law, and I appreciate that the promenade cannot be patrolled 24/7, however, some sort of presence, some sort of enforcement, along with publicising those prosecuted or fined might make a difference, because the current policy - relying on the goodwill of the public- is clearly not working.

 

I do wonder if the apparent absence of any enforcement is due to the fact that back in 2016, the local council wanted to amend the bye-law and allow cycling on the prom, but the Government – in the form of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) – rejected the plan.

 

Exceptionalism and people’s belief that the rules don’t apply to them has never been more apparent than in the last fifteen months, during which time the whole world has been subject to restrictions of one form or another. And during that time there have been many examples of people deciding that the rules did not apply to them.

Dominic Cummings’s eyesight testing drive to Barnard Castle got justified because he was, to quote the Prime Minister, merely doing what any good father would have done, leaving thousands of men crestfallen that by not breaking the rules, they were not good fathers.

 

More egregiously (which last April I would not have thought possible), we had Matt Hancock canoodling with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, in flagrant breach of the social distancing rules that he was largely responsible for. Hancock’s hypocrisy in this matter is breath-taking: You may remember that last year he was all for the police getting involved when Prof Neil Ferguson resigned (with more alacrity than Hancock did) after breaking social distancing rules.

Thousands of people who stuck to the rules and were unable to visit their loved ones in care homes, or relatives ill and dying in hospital will have asked themselves, why did we bother?

Given the sacrifices that so many people have made because they have stuck to the rules, seeing others regularly ignoring them, those same people may be forgiven for taking a more selective approach to which rules they stick to in the future.