Need of civilised attitude to the bicycle (1)

Frans Said, who felt misunderstood (Cyclists Also Road Users, September 17), suggested a re-read of his letter because “his only aim was to highlight the problems and dangers faced by cyclists”.

Mr Said can rest assured that his latest letter was read carefully alongside his previous letters to The Times. These earlier letters were mostly anti-bicycle diatribes peppered with biased remarks such as: “Do (cyclists) want that all traffic should stop whenever there is a cyclist on the road?”, “Do cyclists prefer that each car is preceded by a person waving a red flag?”, “What are they contributing towards road building and maintenance?”, “Cyclists demand priority for use of the road” and so on. To this one might add Mr Said’s ominous statement that “the smaller you are, the more care is required”.

How very true; all the more reason for motorists to drive carefully. He also poured scorn on bicycle users referring to them as “saints on two wheels” – and so on.

As the saying goes, tigers do not change their stripes. Since so much of Mr Said’s previous correspondence on the subject consisted of disparaging comments on bicycle use, readers can be forgiven for regarding his latest letter of September 12 as a thinly disguised attempt at discouraging cycling.

This approach has been called “dangerisation” of cycling based on propagation of unduly negative cultural myths about cycling. As to Mr Said’s repeated negative comments on bicycle use, these have already been roundly refuted both in print and in website blogs.

Regrettably, Mr Said’s letters simply reinforce the impression that some motorists want the road entirely to themselves and have difficulty in accepting the responsibility of driving more carefully in the presence of cyclists. On the other hand, one has to agree with Mr Said that there is a lack of enforcement and police presence on our roads and that the VRT is, at best, a dubious exercise.

Transport Malta accepts too readily that pedestrian deaths on our roads are part of daily life. In this respect Malta remains a Third World country where civility on the roads is absent and traffic accidents are a scourge.

As to the neglect of pedestrians’ and cyclists’ needs, maybe TM should heed this quote from an editorial in the British Medical Journal: “Unlike motorists, cyc­lists rarely injure other people, and surely it is the health and safety of the whole travelling public which should be considered when public policy towards transport is being formulated”.