London's most controversial cyclist
the-londoner.co.uk
the-londoner.co.uk
I would like to borrow this guy for the road in front of my children's school.
> Now in his 50s, Erp was 19 and still living in his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, when he got the call from a local shopkeeper telling him that a drunk driver had collided with his father, who was riding a motorbike. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late. He found his father’s body under a blanket. “I’m long past that”, he says in his thick Zimbabwean accent, swilling his tea. “But my feeling is that if I can save someone else that experience, then that’d be quite a good thing.”
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I look crazy but I'm not. And the funny thing is that other people don't look crazy but they are.
— eden ahbez
I've reported a few which have gone nowhere, because my local force is useless.
Line of Sight definitely had a London section, though it is quite old now https://youtu.be/0npCFw9TEnA?t=1720
‘I felt powerless – so I started filming’: CyclingMikey on his one-man battle with dangerous drivers (126 points, 221 comments)
the other fantasy is carrying a bazooka and shooting anyone speeding. optionally the weapon is futuristic and able to just vaporize the car while leaving passengers unharmed. they just suddenly find themselves sitting on the street looking dumbfounded.
Close passes are not something the police look for (excepting a couple of specific operations where they had a cycling officer) so bikecams are the only way to get the police to take any action and that is usually just to send a warning letter.
Most actual cycle deaths seem to be people crushed by lorries when turning at junctions which seems more an engineering issue - the drivers can't see etc. than bad driving.
The onus is on a driver making a manoeuvre to ensure that it is safe to do so, and turning left shouldn't just be performed blindly if the driver has restricted view around their vehicle. However, there's a lot of poorly designed junctions as well.
I believe that one way to improve the problem of left-turns is to have traffic lights that enable cyclists to go first, or allowing cyclists to treat red lights as "give way" signs or turn-left-on-red.
There's also the question of whether we should allow vehicles to use public roads if they have known "blind spots" that drivers are not able to resolve by moving their heads.
Personally, I'd like to see a far more serious attitude to road/traffic safety. When there's a fatal collision, the junction/road should be closed to motor traffic until the junction can be made safe (e.g. adding a separate cycle lane or amending the traffic lights). However, motornormativity suggests that it'll never happen.
I'm not sure the highway code rules are that appropriate for places like central London. I tend to treat the whole place like a pedestrianised area - not worrying too much about road signs but giving way to pedestrians.
Looking at your phone while driving is extremely dangerous, please don’t do it.
On the phone stuff, I support him too, but that law needs a serious tweak to cover emergencies that require less than a 999 call. Stopped at lights, I saw a hit and run, instinctively reached for my phone for a picture, but stopped myself. That's not a net good for society IMO, but it's the law.
But, the more I looked into it, the more self-conscious I got that a) I would be a sad curmudgeon to do such a thing and, b) I'd be sleep-walking into some horrid authority-complicit sousveillance that raises uncomfortable questions.
Still, I'd really like to report those [expletive deleted]s who skip over pedestrian crossings at speed, on their phone. Gits.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPMBL924 + a ball for the handlebar and a short extension. You can use the smaller ball size, it is still plenty sturdy.
Helmet cameras may compromise the "protection" provided by a cycle helmet though cycle helmets are next to useless in a multi vehicle collision anyway.
“Then he sees it: a driver idling in the late afternoon gridlock while scrolling his phone. Perfect.”
How is this a defense?
"Jaywalking" was an invention by motor car manufacturers to try to victim blame pedestrians for careless driving incidents - luckily we don't have that in Britain.
Can you understand why the rule of law is used to prevent people causing harm to others?
I think it's nonsense to harass people for technically illegal things that are not harming anyone.
I think it would be fantastic if Mikey was passive in filming actual illegal acts that had potential for death or injury.
I don't approve of him inserting himself into situations to try and intervene because I think that just increased the potential for an accident or other undesirable outcome.
Drivers are not able to quickly switch contexts between staring at a phone and looking around their vehicle and this "whatsapp-gap" is painfully obvious when cycling past slow/stopped traffic. It does lead to collisions with other road users - typically pedestrians and cyclists as drivers tend to only bother looking for other car-shaped vehicles and even more so when they're in the 30 second re-adjustment of their attention.
There is no "safe" use of a phone when driving - even using it in a cradle/hands-free which is legal in the UK, leads to a higher level of distraction and there would be a strong argument for making that illegal too, but we should focus more on enforcement of the existing traffic laws.
There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
It's not dangerous at all. Checking a text message at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is by definition harmless.
> There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
I have no need. Mikey is in it for the ego and the guise of 'making the world a bit better'. Anyone who can't see that needs to take a step back and reexamine their assumptions.
Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then. You might as well say that drinking a shot of whisky at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is harmless.
Mikey is absolutely not an egotist - you're just pushing some nasty little agenda of your own by trying to cast doubt on his reasons. His father was killed by a drunk driver and he now attempts to work with the police to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
If you do much road cycling in the UK, it becomes painfully obvious that there's a significant proportion of drivers that do not know how to drive safely or how to pay sufficient attention to what they are doing. I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer. I certainly don't put as much time and effort in as Mikey, but I know exactly where he is coming from and it's just ridiculous when people think he does it for the recognition.
He is NOT that kind of guy.
I'm not, so much as you are heavily biased.
> Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then.
This is nonsense. Cite some studies to support your point if you like, but I doubt you will find any. Most people can check a message responsibly.
The countries that don't make doing so illegal don't tend to have worse accident rates. There's really nothing to support your belief.
> Mikey is absolutely not an egotist
He absolutely is. It's why he forces himself into situations. Not to mention he benfits financially from doing so.
> he now attempts to work with the police
He doesn't work 'with' the police, he forwards footage, that's it.
> to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
He catches some dangerous behavior, he also catches harmless behavior that is common and costs people money. I wish him all the worst.
> I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer.
Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
Studies show "up to 27 seconds" to fully re-focus after using a phone: https://www.science.org/content/article/talking-car-or-smart...
Average of 23 seconds: https://www.cmtelematics.com/blog/the-distraction-hangover-p...
Not sure if this is rigorous, but 34% of crashes occur within 60 seconds of phone distraction: https://www.onfocus.news/new-study-34-of-crashes-happen-with...
The problem with trying to justify phone use when driving is the "normalisation" effect. People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more. One advantage of Mikey's shopping in of phone users is that it provides at least some negative adjustment of drivers' phone use.
I won't address your remarks about Mikey as they are largely matters of opinion, though I seriously doubt that he makes anything more than pocket change from his work and likely that is swallowed up by the costs incurred with buying bike cams.
As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
"Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it. Luckily, it's only a fraction of drivers that do injure others due to phone use, but the same can be said for speeding etc. The idea is to try to prevent careless/dangerous driving that will predictably lead to a greater chance of a collision (NB not an accident as accidents are unavoidable and unpredictable).
> Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
Again, "accident" is better replaced with "collision" as "accident" implies that it's uncontrollable and "just one of those things", whereas the vast majority of collisions are due to driver behaviour such as lack of attention, speeding etc. (I tend to think of "accident" as something like a tree falling onto your vehicle). I've thought about what would happen if a driver did try to grab my cameras, but it would seem to be a very low probability event - I frequent https://road.cc and there's often rider submitted videos of terrible driving and there's very few where the driver has attempted to grab a camera and I can't think of any where they've been successful. I'm fairly tall and muscular, so I don't think I'd be an obvious target and I try to not react emotionally to close passes, though that does take some practise.
My wife had one incident where she was shouting at a driver that dangerously obstructed her on a roundabout (i.e. he pulled straight out ahead of her when she was already on it) and he ended up going all the way round the roundabout in order to follow her. She was turning left just afterwards and he deliberately tried to swing the front of his car at her, either to scare, intimidate or injure her just after the corner - she shouted something like "it's on camera, b*ch" as she has trouble with emotional regulation. He then went ahead and pulled into a side road and exited his car, so he might have been about to assault her, but luckily her journey was about 50m further along at her mum's house, so she didn't find out. The police took her report and video seriously.
It's really not, not if it's informing your view more than fact and reason is.
I applaud you for providing some data (although none peer reviewed and published in standard journals from what I can see), but I have to be skeptical of their results.
Look at rideshare drivers as a counter - they typically have their phones mounted, and see new jobs, texts etc as they come in. If phones were so damaging, don't you think rideshare drivers would be involved in more incidents than most, and an uptick in accidents since ride-sharing became normal? Nothing like that has happened, though.
If the average is 23 seconds, I assume there's some elderly people skewing things, and the mode might be much closer to 5 or 10 seconds. The average in this case could very much be non-representative.
> People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more.
You could say this for anything though. By all means have zero tolerance and harsh penalties for using a phone while the vehicle is in motion, but I think some places even have laws punishing using a phone in the drivers seat in a parked car, which is just ridiculous.
> As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
Sure.
> "Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it.
I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
> The police took her report and video seriously.
That's good.
Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe - it's similar in my mind to the various tests of human perception such as "The Invisible Gorilla" whereby the brain fools people into thinking that they are perceptive and can see obvious objects, but actually testing their perception shows up a big mismatch between their expectations and their actual performance.
Presumably, the "easy money" you refer to is providing an incentive to police forces to prosecute phone using drivers, but the fines go to central government, not the local police forces, so apart from statistics, they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument. Often, police forces seek to send a warning letter as it's easier for them to do so - that demonstrates that they are not focussing on fine revenues and are attempting to educate the problematic drivers.
One aspect we haven't touched upon is that it is a lot easier to prosecute drivers for using a phone whilst in control of a vehicle rather than only prosecuting drivers using a phone whilst in motion. I don't have a problem with drivers who pull in to the side of the road to use their phone, though the law does state that they should turn off their engine to do so. The difference between that and being stuck in traffic is that they have control over when they choose to rejoin the traffic flow and won't just blindly follow what they think the driver in front is doing.
This does remind me of an incident I had a while back. I was cycling along a dual carriageway and a tractor driver behind me used his horn aggressively (i.e. there was nothing that required the horn use) and then overtook. I passed him at the next set of lights at a roundabout and noticed that he was visibly using his phone, so of course the police got the full video (they require two minutes before and after incidents anyhow) and I was smugly satisfied to catch him out as aggressive behaviour can be down to interpretation, but not the phone use.
But as I said, the average is not necessarily representative at all. Also, at least one of the sources would benefit from showing the problem to be bigger than it is.
> they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument.
Do they not have ticket quotas like US cops?
I don't believe so. They've undoubtedly got various performance measures for the various police forces, but I don't think they have a simple arrest quota for individual officers. If they did have to ramp up their numbers, then I think it'd be an easy job for a cycling officer with a camera to go around and capture all the blatant phone use. Unfortunately, when Avon&Somerset police (my area) provide a positive response to video submissions, they use a standard phrase like "As a result of this report I can confirm a positive outcome in that the driver(s) identified in the submission(s) will receive either a warning letter, a fixed penalty or a prosecution." which doesn't provide much feedback as to what action they are taking (a warning letter is barely an action though I do think they're a good idea). I have also had responses where they also mention a possible NIP (notice of intended prosecution).
As a counter-example of police just looking to make easy arrests, there plenty of reports on https://road.cc where certain forces (e.g. Lancashire) seem to bend over backwards to not take any action on cyclist submitted videos. It's a bit of a lottery as to which areas take things like close passes seriously or not.
The law was brought in specifically to try to save lives - hardly a "silly" reason.
Using your phone at all while driving in the UK is illegal, stopped or otherwise.
- Filming his commutes - fine
- Reporting when people put him in harm's way - more than fine
- Reporting people he sees who don't endanger him personally but are breaking the rules and could create dangerous situations - probably fine, though getting a little iffy for me
- Going out of his way to look into people's cars and look for phone use - pretty iffy
- Deliberately creating confrontation and direct danger, out of other drivers illegal driving - too far for sure (look up "Gandalf corner")
It is sucky that the police don't do more of this enforcement. But as another London cyclist, he crosses the line that makes me feel less safe as a cyclist, due to the elevated level of hate cyclists receive.
I'm sure there is a lot positive to be said for his work; unfortunately he - like many (most?) on each side in the cyclists vs cars vs pedestrians debate - is as much an idealogue as anybody, often unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists - leaving him untrustworthy as a good faith participant, while allowing his video evidence as useful in more balanced hands.
Cyclists certainly endanger people, you could have done a 5 second fact check before posting.
Eg.
Cyclists injured record number of pedestrians last year, data reveals
Collisions on pavements and at zebra crossings surged nearly 60 percent in five years
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/cyclists-injured-pedestrians-r...
when talking about the echo chambers, aren't you painting all cyclists with the same brush here?
And even if that were the case, why do you think he should fight that battle? He chooses to go after reckless car drivers, who cause thousands of deaths per year (including his father's). Why would you expect him to engage in this whataboutism on bicyclists?
> don't endanger other people's lives
> Cyclists certainly endanger people
Your article talks about 600 injuries caused by cyclists, I am talking about 15000 deaths a year caused by cars. And you try to frame it as a "both sides bad (but actually cyclists are worse because of their entitlement and bad behavior)"
While he probably does a good job, it seems a bit over the top. I don't see that much bad driving in central London. Quite a lot of iffy cycling though especially from the deliveroo guys.
He documents these "transgressions", and submit it to the police. He calculates that he's brought the city hundreds of thousands of Euros in revenue.
Except the police ignore all of his reports because they're mostly nit-picky bullshit.
Uhm no because there are no downsides to a law against cannibalism. There are significant downsides to a law requiring number plates on bicycles. What an idiot.
The guy has got sucked into a sort of spiral where he's going out to create these confrontations (partly to monetize on youtube), and he will, eventually cause some serious harm to himself or someone else. This article kind of misses that this isn't a story about road safety, it's more a story about how people can self-radicalise and how social media has created a profit incentive for them to do so.
It's difficult to watch a motorist threaten to take his own life if this guy reports him and then remember that actually, that's happening for ad revenue.
Anyone who chooses to grab their phone while driving a car deserves all the negativity they get. Unlearn that habit. Seek help if you're addicted to that device. Or just take the Tube.
If not, the driver is still in the wrong.
More importantly, laws are written under the tacit assumption that they won't be perfectly enforced. Have you ever driven 31 mph in a 30 mph zone? Illegal! You're in the wrong!
I have never watched his videos so I don't know what proportion of his videos are of people stopped at lights briefly looking at their phone... but I don't think many people (even cyclists) would seriously object to that.
I both cycle and drive a lot. There are a lot of bad drivers that I wish would get snitched. But I also occasionally look at my phone while waiting at a red light.
“a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)”
That’s from Miriam Webster. I’d say he isn’t punishing crime, I could see an argument that he’s suppressing it, but it doesn’t really fit my normal view of the word.
The guy is quite literally taking the law into his own hands and it's very clear that running around trying to cause car accidents is making people less safe, not more. In many cases the "accident" he claims to want to prevent is caused by his actions.
The reasons we don't do that are manifold, but at least a few are analogous:
* legibility: we don't need just lack of harm, we require common knowledge that harm is unlikely in order for society to work with frictionlessness we desire
* distinguishability: at some percentage of accidental behaviour, we must constrain all people because we don't have a mechanism to determine who will likely cause it and who won't
* reversibility: for sufficient harm, it is better to restrict the error condition than it is to punish
Because we know we cannot bring the dead back to life, and no amount of prison will bring solace to their loved ones, we have decided that doing things that are high-risk to others is not permissible. Given this framework for the moral concern, it's just an optimization problem. The question then becomes what fraction of pedestrians killed in crosswalks is acceptable, or even what fraction of pedestrians following the law killed in crosswalks is acceptable. Some societies believe this should be zero (hence the amusingly named Vision Zero and so on as practised in Northern Europe). Others believe this should be fairly high (like the US) because the utility loss from constraint is too high.
Now the handgun case has a very high number for potential risk, so it's obvious why most societies have that law. The crossing point of risk for almost everyone is below it, consequently most agree. The question then becomes what your crossing point for risk is and whether the number of accidental deaths is above your threshold or below your threshold. But in either case, I don't think the argument "until they hurt someone, no harm is done, and therefore it should be permissible" holds, for if it did, surely we would allow for people walking around with handguns, perhaps even pointed directly in front of them as they walk, so long as they do not pull the trigger. And that seems to be an absurdity.
The status of open carry legality in a US state is not correlated with firearms violence rates. Firearm prevalence in general is.
I support Vision Zero. It has a sound logical and statistical basis.
Vision Zero is orthogonal to a law against using a mobile telephone while operating a vehicle that is stopped.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
You have never been sitting at a light, and see everone around you with their heads down, while the light has been green for 4 seconds?
Inverse, Have you ever been rear ended because a person staring down at their phone at a red light just decides to roll forward because someones brake lights in the pack deluminate for a moment?
I ask, because point 1 happens to me daily, and point 2 has put my car in the shop for weeks twice in the last 5 years.
A totally separate point to make; what could you possibly be doing on the phone? Like how addicted to social media or work must one be that they wait for the briefest of moments to distract themselves? I ask that not to judge or poke fun, but to say that you MUST be doing something that you find so important, and thus taking your attention, that it is now your priority. Or else, you would choose to wait.
I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know what people are talking about here.
As for what I'm doing, it's probably something like scrolling the map to see what road I'll be turning on in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to look at it (regardless of whether I'd be touching it) later. Or a dozen other similar things, none of which have anything to do with social media.
And I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know this.
I say this having both a vehicle with wireless carplay, and another where I need to manually configure maps. And yes, I often fiddle with maps as I'm a nervous wreck, but I truly cannot imagine doing it "on the fly".
my company does not pay me enough to hyper scan my phone for teams/outlook, nor does my interest in "task/notification x" trump my desire to not have my car in the shop for weeks.
Different strokes I guess. I'm sure you're a safe driver all things considered.
Other drivers are doing dangerous actions. For example, the embedded video in the article showed a driver crash into his bicycle as he crossed the street. That driver then departed the scene. Hit and run is culturally and legally offensive in the UK and the rest of the OECD.
1. The driver realizes out of their peripheral vision that the light has changed but wants to finish the urgent TikTok they’re watching so they accelerate, often rapidly, without looking around and fails to notice other road users. I’ve seen people hit other cars because they didn’t notice the car ahead of them had stopped accelerating due to congestion, and countless times where they almost or did hit someone (fortunately never fatally) in the crosswalk because they were in “green means go mode” before they were fully back to looking outside their vehicle.
2. The driver continues to look at their phone and fails to notice when the light changes. Someone behind them gets mad and does something dangerous to pass such as driving in the opposite traffic lane, a bike lane, or in a pedestrian space.
Yes, many people do look at phones without hitting anyone but that’s like saying it’s okay to celebrate by firing a gun in the air because only a few people get hit. It’s a statistical certainty that the more times someone engages in unsafe activity, the more people will be on the unlucky side of those odds. If you have a couple million daily car trips in London, even 99.9999% safety means someone getting hurt every day.
The car was stationary until just before he stepped out and the driver already knew to expect that he would do so. It does seem that Mikey had time to avoid the crash though.
At most, this was rolling it into traffic, but my view is he had a hand on the handlebar until right around the collision, so he was just walking with his bike.
But WTF is that traffic configuration? Why are people trying to drive through that lane in the wrong direction? Seems like a good way to get a head-on with a car in addition to pedestrians that weren't expecting a wrong way driver.
Vehicle operators usually have a duty not to proceed unless safe, even when they have right of way, I'm not sure how much that duty applies to pedestrians or if natural consequences is enough.
People shouldn't break the law while driving. What Cycling Mikey is doing is ill-advised and dangerous.
Noting that I didn't say or think that he's in the right for the collision and the video I linked (which was the first that I found showing the situation before the viral moment) concludes that both were in the wrong, as noted in its description.