No matter what the road safety issue is, cyclist-hating always seems acceptable | Peter Walker

When I tweeted my delight at the news that police in London have adopted an innovative scheme to target drivers who overtake cyclists too closely or otherwise put them at risk, the first reply was wearyingly predictable.

“My 84-year-old friend was knocked over by a speeding cyclist and left bleeding on the road,” they said. “If it had been a car, there would have been a registration number.”

The response to this is twofold. Yes, of course, the incident sounds awful, and my sympathies are with the friend. But it’s vital to also consider this: the same level of recklessness from a car driver would almost certainly have left them not bleeding but unconscious.

This distinction is at the heart of the so-called close pass operation, pioneered by West Midlands police and now being tried out by the Met.

This sees plainclothes officers sent out on bikes to monitor how motor vehicles treat them. If someone passes too closely, tailgates or turns across their path, uniformed colleagues up the road give out advice or a fine.

For me, the key to such schemes is this: not all interactions on the road are equal in terms of potential repercussions. On a daily basis, incidents where cars, vans, trucks and buses strike cyclists or pedestrians maim or kill people. When cyclists hit pedestrians it is vastly rarer.

This is the point missed by my Twitter-replying correspondent and so many others. It’s not about morals, it’s about physics.

If I were to recklessly plough into someone at a pedestrian crossing while driving a mid-sized SUV at 35mph, the kinetic energy visited on them would be roughly 200 times greater than if I did the same thing at 12mph on a bike.

This is why, even when pedestrians are struck and killed by cars that mount the pavement, the news rarely makes it beyond the local press. On the very rare occasions a bike is involved it is national news.

All this is not to argue that people tend to behave any more lawfully when on bikes. In some cities a certain percentage of riders do ride blithely through red lights, or skim past old people and toddlers on pavements.

But, as the statistics show again and again, humans are no more sensible in cars, routinely breaking speed limits or staring at mobile phones at the wheel.

The difference is that the same behaviour on a bike tends to predominantly cause intimidation and annoyance. In a car, it can and does change or end lives every single day. This can sound like an excuse for poor cycling. It’s not. It’s a plea for proportion and context.

It’s also not to say police should ignore dangerous cycling. But don’t pretend it’s an equal safety focus to dangerous driving.

So why not focus necessarily finite police resources on the actions that cause the most danger? That is the explicit view taken by the traffic officers at West Midlands police, if not yet at the Met.

In a regular blog by West Midlands officers they mention the common complaint about the “close pass” operation: what about cyclist lawbreaking?

“Cyclists don’t cause us, as an organisation, problems,” they respond. “That’s because they aren’t causing our communities problems, they aren’t killing nearly 100 people on our region’s roads as mechanically propelled vehicles currently do.

“Bad cycling is an irritant to the wider community rather than a danger, and maybe an improvement in infrastructure and policing may alleviate many of the reasons that cause a very small minority of cyclists to be an irritant.”

Such words can sound heretical amid the current media discourse on road use, which sees every interaction on the roads as necessarily a battle (often with moral characteristics) and cyclists – a small minority in the UK – generally viewed in the wrong.

This is to utterly miss the point. In any other area of life where thousands of people a year were being killed amid their everyday business, the understandable focus would be on the things responsible for the overwhelming majority of the deaths. Roads should be no different.