“Why don’t you apologise? Don’t be so selfish”: CyclingMikey’s latest argument with pedestrian on shared use path sparks discussion; Local angry with cyclist “holding up the road” despite not being in lane; TdF Femmes debrief + more on the live blog
Why should I?
It’s been a little while since we last covered one of CyclingMikey’s encounters with the people of London, but this latest video is a classic of his subgenre, posted to highlight, “The attitude of this pedestrian, not willing to share the shared path whilst I’m riding slowly and considerately.”
And, for what it’s worth, those are all elements of this worth highlighting, a shared use path that the pedestrian presumes he’s exclusively entitled to walk along, despite multiple signs highlighting otherwise.
Once again though, what’s most striking with these videos is the tone. It’s sarky, needless interjection from the pedestrian but Mikey’s response immediately gets into the details of the rules of the shared use path, fuelling a tense conversation clearly built on misinformation, with the pedestrian unaware cyclists were allowed on the path until Mikey stops and drops behind him. There’s also no attempt to engage in the merits of cycling on the other footway, with Mikey only informs us isn’t possible after the exchange.
Admittedly, compared to some of his other exchanges this is all rather tame stuff, there’s no anger or road-rage (path-rage?) and he gets on with his journey soon enough. But you have to wonder who benefits from an exchange like this being posted online, short of the locals who may now actually know where cyclists can ride over the bridge?
The second argument made after the exchange, that “why should” cyclists have to ride in the road when they have access to a shared use path, seems to have been picked up upon by a lot of social media users, the same users who would tend to complain when they see a cyclist riding in the road and not using a cycle lane. Sometimes you can’t win…
> “Everybody hates you!” Fuming phone driver abandons car in traffic and confronts Cycling Mikey
Vollering switches to a real life Instagram profile photo
Whether that’s because of the AI backlash or just because there are probably lots of decent photos to choose from when you’ve just won the Tour de France (which is perhaps why a lot of people were puzzled about the use of a muddled AI hallucination yesterday) this is perhaps for the best, even if to keep the sponsors happier…
No lantern for the lanterne rouge
Eline Jansen of VolkerWessels – pictured above at the back of the breakaway on stage 2 – may not have finished as the Tour de France’s lanterne rouge, that honour goes to Ireland’s Mia Griffin, but on yesterday’s stage the Dutchwoman found herself at the back of the race, which involved four laps of a circuit starting and finishing in Nice.
On the penultimate lap, she was accidentally guided through the finish line before having to turn around and head back past the moved barriers to start her final ascent of the Col d’Eze. But not before she found herself shouting and waving away officials standing in the middle of the finish and blocking her way down what she was led to believe was still the race route.
She eventually crossed the line nearly 33 minutes behind Demi Vollering, a fantastic effort considering 11 riders either didn’t start or finish the race’s final stage and wanted to start the party early, including the likes of Marianne Vos, Alison Jackson and Letizia Borghesi. Understandably, she was unwilling to talk about her ordeal after the stage, but I’m sure I can join everyone else in saying ‘chapeau’ to Eline.
TDFF debrief
There are two more storylines from yesterday’s final stage that Ryan has entrusted me to share. We start with Elisa Longo Borghini who finished on the Tour de France podium for the first time in her career yesterday.
And in her post-stage interviews the 34-year-old reflected on the team dynamic between herself, Paula Blasi (5th overall, 6’13” behind the maillot jaune) and Dominika Wlodarczyk (7th, 7’53”)
“I think we showed that we raced well, and smart. It was questionable for sure, having three leaders. I understand the journalists, they have to do their job and their work, and I respect that 100%, but sometimes there is too much speculation, and it hurts the people too.
“Behind and after the race there is a girl, a woman – we do a suffer a little bit sometimes when we read some silly stuff, let’s say. Sometimes I just think we should think twice before writing down things.
“I think we showed that we could work very well today, and in the end, Paula was working for me, and I was working for her – until I punctured – for the sprint because she is super-fast and I wanted to give her a chance to be second in a stage in the Tour de France. We went all in, and we showed we were strong.”
That’s all well and good, and I’m glad everything worked out for the team. But it wasn’t journalists who stirred unrest by writing of the team’s leadership tensions, it was Blasi herself who gave a pre-race interview where she made clear she was to be a domestique for the other two leaders. Then the team’s DS Cherie Pridham made the same point…
View this post on Instagram
Thijs Zonneveld’s questioning here is laser-focused, and admittedly uncomfortable for the team, but it would be significantly less uncomfortable if Pridham were willing to give a more detailed or open answer to address the question of team leadership. To now claim after the race that the team had three clear leaders was disingenuous on the team’s part, not the journalists. Ah well, I suppose it worked out for the team, and that’s all that matters to them…
AI fire
It is surely the biggest moment of your career: winning the final stage of the Tour de France, solo, in the yellow jersey. A sporting pinnacle. And thankfully the photos from that moment are pretty sweet to boot…
View this post on Instagram
But for reasons we can’t quite explain, Demi Vollering has chosen to create an AI image and make it her new profile picture on social media. In many ways this isn’t surprising, given Vollering has attracted strong suspicion for using AI to write her often-lengthy social media posts on both Instagram and LinkedIn.
In May, after she intervened to write a lengthy post commenting on Thymen Arensman’s reluctance to make himself available for media interviews, the post was suspected to be 100 percent AI generated.
You wonder what the team and Vollering’s personal sponsors make of it, whether they’re rather annoyed with this airbrushed rendering that is now the top image of the biggest female cyclist in the world, or if, sickeningly, they would prefer this to actual content from her riding and winning on her bike. In which case we might as well all go home and descend into our little dream worlds, all whilst wrecking the bigger one outside.
Suffice to say it’s not to my taste. Whilst we’re here though, here’s Ryan’s write-up of the beef that has since tenderised and fallen off the bone since Saturday…
Cringeworthy Cheddar bile
It’s difficult to know where to start with this caption of a police car being held up by a driver who is slowing down to mind a cyclist on the inside of the road near Cheddar Gorge.
The implication from the poster appears to be that “another idiot” is the cyclist, riding “as if he owned the road.”
This is a fascinating suggestion, implying that you only need to hog the tiniest bit of kerb to stake your claim as a rightful road owner. Good news for drains and broken glass everywhere. Thankfully, the Facebook comments are quick to call out this tripe…
“Cyclist isn’t even in the carriageway in either photo. They’re plumb on the white line at the left of the carriageway. If the police car wanted to overtake the cyclist they would. Issue is a car and a blind bend combination. Looks like the car did slow/pull over and it’s unlikely that the police vehicle lost more than a few seconds.”
“All I see I the driver of rhe grey car pointing themselves towards the cyclist in an attempt to get out of the way of the police car.
“How would you prefer this to unfold? The Police car wait until everyone has pulled over safely or perhaps the cyclist should dive into the bushes? Siren on means the same as a car horn. It is an awareness of presence. It is not a demand to loose your mind, change direction or speed.”
“The way taught to vehicles to allow a police car to pass is they should REDUCE their speed GRADUALLY or MAINTAIN it, move left as much is safely possible. It is the police cars job to complete the passing manoeuvre the highway code and police advice videos both say a form of this.”
Weekend at the Femmes:
From a dramatic weekend of racing that saw Demi Vollering ultimately claim her second Tour de France title, here are Ryan’s dispatches if you fancy a chronological recap, starting with Kasia Niewiadoma’s historic Ventoux win to nab yellow from Marlen Reusser:
Saturday’s stage, won with a late Demi Vollering solo move, was overshadowed by allegations of FDJ blocking the yellow jersey from following Vollering’s accelerations. Apparently, the air has since been cleared…
Then yesterday, after Reusser was distanced by the favourites on a crash, Vollering dropped Niewiadoma on the final climb to solo to victory in yellow, leaving our man on the ground to reflect on the Dutchwoman’s place in the sport…
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Very brief look at this but I'm not sure it says anything much new, or particularly useful. Yes, they point to "some women who rode a hire bike possibly didn't ride before but might ride after". OTOH the *number* of women vs men surveyed didn't appear to be stated (except for one graph with a n=... - which was a lot less than the 5000 mentioned, and there only about half as many women responding there). Otherwise I think it just covers what regularly comes up (albeit perhaps it has to be repeated): - much fewer women from minority ethnic backgrounds. - Women care about socially safe parking locations far more than men do. - Women feel less safe on the roads due to external issues that they have no control over: traffic, road conditions and infrastructure, and harassment.
Interesting counterpoint to the 'hire bike menace' narrative (obviously with the caveat that the report authors have a vested interest in selling the benefits, but...) Appears hire bike schemes go some way to addressing the cycling gender imbalance and, given the point about parking immediately outside the destination, dockless schemes particularly so. https://micromobilitybiz.com/forest-report-finds-shared-e-bikes-are-helping-close-london-cycling-gender-gap/
@chrisonabike True, things went back to normal once the pandemic was over. In this case, however the problems are still ongoing, and aren't likely to be resolved in the near future. If anything, they're going to get worse. Food shortages are predicted because of the effect that the heatwave has had on crops. This is bound to push prices up. The Straits of Hormuz aren't likely to reopen anytime soon and the strategic oil reserves are running low. Russia is having to import petrol because its own refineries have been badly hit, so that's even more competition for an even more scarce resource. I think that more and more people are going to see cycling as a way of cutting household bills.
I think if "grown up" cyclists * are quibbling about ASLs we've very much missed the road safety point anyway. (Not to mention the wider "better transport choices" picture). ASLs are poor-to-useless "cycling infra", even for their design intent. If the idea is "for less confident cyclists" then a design that requires that you re-position in front of the motor traffic - waiting to accelerate - seems unhelpful. Of course they're only designed to help when traffic is stopped, and you can reach the front in time and if vehicles aren't already occupying them. As we're noting here drivers frequently ignore them - whether that be deliberate, a lack of road craft, because they were concentrating on following the vehicle in front, or because the paint has rubbed off. * Aside: shouldn't cycling also be safe and accessible for kids? Or should they only be allowed to do this when accompanied by sufficient qualified adults? Or be limited to parks and otherwise being driven around by their carers? Perhaps there is another way...?
Hi Bungle, I saw you follow-up comment. I can't imaging there's a tolerance of 4 seconds on camera enforced lights, seems an odd decision - an offence is committed if a vehicle starts crossing on a red, any tolerance is discretionary. There does seem to be some odd thinking about 'advanced stop lines' where the rules relating to them are identical to a regular stop line, as explained correctly elsewhere in the Highway Code. It does seem a regular offence. Where I live it doesn't help that some of them are very faint and disappear in rain.
@ktache Not sure he's totally ruled out of the worlds yet (though I think it would be best if he doesn't), normal recovery time is about eight weeks but surgery can halve that...depending on the nature of the break he could be just about fit to ride by the time of the elite men's race, but he'll have missed a lot of training. Hopefully his managers and team will persuade him to wait until Lombardia, if not just to knock it off for the rest of the year.
@Bungle_52 The Met told me a couple of years ago when rejecting a submission that they needed a clear three seconds of red visible before they would consider it for an RLJ prosecution. I pointed out to them that this meant that at 30 mph a driver could see a light change to red from 40 metres away and still get through without sanction, or 55 m if they accelerated to 40 as most do. They just replied "them's our rules..."
@Ben Graham I have just checked the footage from my report. The driver crosses the 1st stop line 4 seconds after the light turns red. All on camera from behind the vehicle. No further action. So I assume the margin is at least 4 seconds.
Oh, and active travel funding per head (in England at least) is laughable compared to other places. Plus it is delivered intermittently. It's more like a Blue Peter contest...
Yup, I see those opportunities being missed all the time in Edinburgh. When it gets really bad, dig it all up and put it back down again how it was. Contrast with what seems to happen in NL - when things are dug up the whole thing seems to get a "let's redo this according to the current standards" treatment. They even coordinate with the utilities, so that after a refurb the street isn't immediately dug up again because of leaking pipes / we suddenly realised the new estate being planned for round the corner will want broadband etc. Pros and cons of course - you may wait longer there for changes as smaller changes may be deferred until a major redo is due. (Though in the UK case you likely wouldn't get them at all...) It seems we "can't have nice things" in the UK in part because a) we have greater motor traffic speeds/volumes spead across "streets" / within urban areas b) the funding and organisational responsibility differs. Are we in the "Sam Vimes boots" territory (being too poor to afford better products which not only save money over time but actually work)? There is long term money pressure on LAs and it seems that due to poor construction and maintenance we have to regularly pour money into (pot-)holes in the road. And it seems there's no budget to check up on or enforce adequate standards from utilities work or even private building.
26 thoughts on ““Why don’t you apologise? Don’t be so selfish”: CyclingMikey’s latest argument with pedestrian on shared use path sparks discussion; Local angry with cyclist “holding up the road” despite not being in lane; TdF Femmes debrief + more on the live blog”
l o v e Mikey — keep at it. Hot London day, maybe. A big hello works fine in a cool rainy Edinburgh.
Nigel “courteous” comments coming in 3…2…1…
CM’s completely in the right and the pedestrian’s a dick. However, as I commented on the Facebook video, it would have been nice to see CM thanking the people earlier who stepped aside without complaint. Every pedestrian and driver who gets a thank you or an after you from a cyclist when appropriate is just that little bit more likely to treat the next cyclist who comes along decently.
“Why don’t you stick to the road mate?” Was the pedestrian’s perfectly reasonable question. After all, Mikey is relying on the good will of more vulnerable road users to make space for him on a busy walkway, creating inconvenience for themselves and wasting Mikey’s time too.
Well, I can answer that.
Firstly, Mikey produces provocative YouTube content. If he was quietly cycling on the road, well that’s not very interesting content is it? But having silly altercations on a shared footpath by constantly activating an irritating bell and engaging in snarky conversations gets a few clicks and keeps the revenue rolling in.
Secondly, Mikey has a very sketchy road safety record himself. The last time I saw him riding on the road I’m YouTube, he ride straight through a red light. I don’t know of the Met police bothered to investigate him for it, doubtful given the amount of Twitter policing they have to do – also don’t forget they spent 4 months investigating someone for revealing Jason Ardey’s alleged plagiarism….. So perhaps it’s just as well he sticks to the pavement!
@jackcycles Firstly, he is on the road.
Secondly, I don’t know what you’re trying to say because all the words are there, but they come out in some sort of spaghetti.
@GMBasix sorry I’m on my mobile device and didn’t bother to look at the third paragraph before hitting “Post”. Turns out autocorrect mangled it, sorry about that.
@jackcycles Why would the Met investigate the allegations against Arday? From what I can tell Arday had a post at Cambridge University and the allegations are about a paper published by Belfast University. Not sure where the (London) Met Police would come in to it? In fact, I can’t see any sign of police involvement at the moment, current reporting is about academic investigations.
@sheridan that’s what you’d expect, but don’t forget we’re operating a two-tier justice system, things like this take priority. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo for more.
The Met police spent 4 months investigating a journalist for looking into the claims.
They wouldn’t, however they did spend time investigating the journalist looking into the PhD plagiarism, and the commissioner has since admitted that this was a mistake.
@mark1a However they didn’t, of course, spend four months investigating it as Nigel alleges. They received a formal complaint of harassment from Arday’s solicitors at the end of November and called the journalist to offer him right of reply to the allegations in February, then closed the case. Anyone who has had any dealings with the rozzers knows how glacially slow their processes are, a three month delay does not mean they are diligently beavering away exploring all avenues in the interim.
You do, however, accept that the police had a 4 month window – from November to February – where the met police engaged in a criminal investigation into a Times Education journalist for asking two polite questions about alleged plagiarism via email.
You don’t know how long, during that four months, they actually spent investigating it, but we do know the investigation was open for 4 months… they might have been working on the case 24/7 for all we know, just at a police pace (Don’t forget those donuts and cups of tea take a long time to consume).
Out of morbid curiosity, why do you think the police did that, rather than try to solve crimes?
@Nigel Garage Not very good adding up for an accountant, Nigel. The police received the formal complaint on November 18th, 2024, and closed the case after calling the journalist in “early February” 2025. So essentially two-and-a-half months tops, with the Christmas period in the middle. The police deal with investigations as a matter of priority, a complaint of harassment from an academic about a journalist would be well down the list. It’s more than likely that the complaint was received and logged and put in an in tray, once someone got round to dealing with it they called the journalist to offer right of reply and then closed the case. Or do you think they spent “four months” (a temporal impossibility) carrying out extensive investigations into the case without ever calling the accused? Try applying common sense instead of your prejudices.
@Rendel Harris If there were two people assigned to it full-time, (with a break for Christmas) then in accounting terms that might be considered four months…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
@jackcycles If he was on the road, you can almost guarantee there would be an equally ignorant driver saying “why don’t you ride on the cycle path”?
No matter where he rode there will be someone who has a lack of common courtesy.
@jackcycles So predictable. How sad.
It’s pathetically like Trump (whom Nigel, as I recall, thinks is the greatest POTUS in history), isn’t it? Before one has even finished the headline one knows not only that he’s going to be an idiot about it but exactly what he’s going to say.
DON’T FEED THE TROLL
(Every time you do, they go off for a crafty w*nk – ignore them and they will go off to get their kicks somewhere else)
jack off ?
But on the other hand, why would they want to let all their rivals know exactly what their plans were? The best answer here would have been “Mind your own business.”
Re : Police passing car and cyclist, I am confused.
Between the 2 images the cyclist appears to have progressed a cars length or 2, and the car behind him the same, as far as I can see both have pulled over to allow the Police to pass.
I’m more confused about WHERE DID THE ***ing GOLF COME FROM in the 2nd image ?
@StuInNorway photos taken a week apart. Ragebait. 😉
@StuInNorway Presumably they pulled out from the parking on the other side without paying any attention to the oncoming traffic / police car.
@mdavidford That would seem likely.
If I recall there is a cave or two along the route – perhaps they were sheltering from the heat in one of those having taken it for a Golf bunker?
Bland and overcooked spaghetti
Cyclists ride as if they own the roads; actually, they do own the roads; they are public roads.