City of London police officials have urged cyclists in the capital not to “gamble” that pedestrians will move out of the way, after new figures revealed that the number of people on bikes caught running red lights has doubled in the past year.
Data released today by the City of London Police, covering the period from the start of April 2025 to the end of March 2026, has revealed that the force’s cycle team issued 1,315 fixed penalty notices to cyclists for riding through red lights – compared to the 643 cyclists caught committing the same offence during the previous financial year.
However, this year’s fine tally is roughly similar to the number of fixed penalty notices issued in 2023-24, when 1,229 red light-jumping cyclists were fined in the City of London.
The force says it is issuing, on average, 25 fines a week to cyclists going through red lights (for comparison, the wider Metropolitan Police average sees around 11 cyclists a day stopped and fined for riding through red lights).
This morning, City of London Police hosted a ‘cycle roadshow’ as part of the force’s “education, engagement, and enforcement” work. During the roadshow, cyclists caught running red lights were invited to attend the event – with refusal to do so resulting in a £50 fine – and speak to members of the visually impaired community, highlighting “how their actions affect their ability to safely cross the road”.
“Most cyclists are safe and obey the Highway Code, however, we are educating, engaging and where necessary enforcing those road users who go through red lights, putting themselves and pedestrians at risk,” Sergeant Stuart Ford, the Cycle Team lead at the City of London Police, said in a statement.
“Running a red light puts pedestrians, especially vulnerable ones, at risk. Cyclists gamble on the fact that pedestrians will move out the way, ignoring any hidden vulnerabilities.
“Cyclists who run a red light for the sake of saving a few minutes could endanger other vulnerable road users.
“We are going the extra mile by listening to concerns of the public and cracking down on anti-social behaviour and road offences.”
It’s worth noting from the outset that the City of London refers to the Square Mile north of the River Thames from the Tower of London to near Blackfriars, not the entire city. Nevertheless, the City of London Police and Corporation officials have long touted tougher penalties for cyclists who run red lights in the area.
Last September, we reported that the force was considering using Community Protection Warnings and Notices to issue stronger sanctions than £50 Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs).
Officials have reportedly expressed concern about “dangerous, anti-social, and nuisance cycling behaviours” such as red light jumping, with councillor Jacqueline Webster also suggesting promotion of a “culture of courteousness” among cyclists is needed due to the parking of dockless hire bikes.
At a meeting of the Corporation’s Streets and Walkways Sub-Committee in September, the situation was raised and a paper noted that claimed poor behaviour remains a concern, even if road safety statistics show the City’s streets are safer than ever for cyclists and pedestrians.
Of this poor behaviour, cyclists running red lights at busy junctions, dangerous use of e-bikes, and bikes being ridden in pedestrianised areas were apparently the main issues raised.
This week, following the release of the force’s latest red light figures, Tijs Broeke, Chair of the City of London Corporation’s Police Authority Board, said: “City streets are shared by pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, which means everyone needs to show respect for their fellow road users.
“I fully support City Police’s pro-active approach in tackling something we know is a big issue for residents and workers, and one which puts others at risk.
“Initiatives like this send a strong message that the rules apply to everyone, and we all have shared responsibility to ensure the Square Mile is a place where everyone can feel safe and welcome.”
The new figures also show that the City of London’s cycle team has been seizing almost one illegal e-bike a day, with 351 illegal e-bike seizures made during the last financial year, compared to 326 the previous year.
While cycling behaviour has attracted the attention of police and officials in the City, September’s paper did note that cycle numbers are up massively in recent years and, with vehicle traffic in the City falling, casualties per cyclist are also down 45 per cent since 2016-17.
35 thoughts on ““The rules apply to everyone”: Number of London cyclists fined for jumping red lights more than doubles in a year, as police warn about endangering pedestrians “for sake of saving a few minutes””
“Most cyclists are safe and obey the Highway Code”. I’m sorry, but it always annoys me that everything is framed as being a minority of bad eggs. Any of us who cycle in London know that those of us who actually stop are the ones in the overwhelming minority. Sometimes I honestly feel like I’m the idiot as I wait at a light while one cyclist after another powers through. Then finally one stops next to you and you think “great, I’m not alone”, only for them to jump the next red.
I am sure there are indeed plenty of red light jumping cyclists rolling about the streets of London, but there will also be plenty of other riders stopping at the red lights just as you do. Your perception will be skewed by your lived experience.
As someone stopping at lights, your perception will be the same as a car driver. And what I mean by this is that as someone stopped at a red light, the cyclists you are most likely to see are those running lights as they are constantly moving forward. The one’s stopped at the lights behind you, are going to stay behind you, so you’ll never see them.
I remember a downhill MTBer said to me once, that XC riders are crap at going downhill. I said to him ‘no, you’re only seeing poor technical XC riders as they are the only one’s you ever catch’ – its the same thing here.
Aligned to the above, the other reason more cyclists seemingly jump red lights than cars, is because they can. A car can only really jump a light if they are the first one to that light. As soon as one car stops at a light, everyone behind is forced to adhere to the law as well. If cars could move around stationary traffic like a cyclist can, I’d expect the rates of red light jumping car drivers to be dramatically higher.
Cyclist’s behaviour is a reflection of society, not an affront against it.
WRT opportunity to jump lights, IIRC there are stats on this from TRL from a long time ago.
Basically while cyclists are the worst offenders, the difference for any given years data is within margin of error for rate of red light jumping GIVEN opportunity (i.e. at a red light without any other obstruction). And the numbers were terrifyingly high (around 1 in 6 IIRC). With observers used pointing out that the only accident during period of observation was amber gambling car going through a red…
IMHO cyclists shouldn’t be jumping lights, BUT should be campaigning for law changes for ‘idaho stop’ style regulations, preferably similar to Paris – signage permits riders going in some directions to treat lights as stop lines. Though this would also require forcing road designers to actually implement said signage…
We should also accept the fact that any driver who stops in a bike box has either committed the same offence as a cyclist or another driver going through the junction on red (the circumstances may be different, but the offence is the same), or has been so unplanned in their approach to lights as to be careless or inconsiderate.
The weasel words allowing for the teeny-tiny time difference between crossing the first line and stopping at the 2nd if the lights change is a sop. In practice, if you’re driving carefully (in fact, as the Highway Code advises you to) and effectively treating it as a yellow hatched box, you can choose to stop at the first line or make your way safely through the junction in almost all cases.
But they don’t. It’s treated by drivers and [not] enforced as a discretionary observance. Then the bike box becomes as much a trap for cyclists as a junction without the bike box – is it any wonder discerning cyclists wouldn’t want to wait there? The driver has already shown themself to be ignorant of other road users.
GMBasix wrote “In practice, if you’re driving carefully (in fact, as the Highway Code advises you to) and effectively treating it as a yellow hatched box, you can choose to stop at the first line or make your way safely through the junction in almost all cases.
But they don’t. It’s treated by drivers and [not] enforced as a discretionary observance.”
I was stopped in a cycle box at a red light when a driver pulled up along side me. I reported this to Gloucestershire OpSnap. I had front and rear footage so the video showed the driver actually crossing the ASL on red. The response was.
Rule 178
I am beginning to suspect Gloucestershire has now moved to someone having to be inconvenienced in order to take action on anything, not just close passes. As far as I can tell this is not a careless driving offence, as a close pass would be, but failure to obey a traffic sign. I’m sure someone on here can put me right if I’ve got this wrong.
https://road.cc/content/news/close-pass-isnt-offence-says-police-officer-310433
Many of The City streets and junctions have relatively few motor vehicles. At junctions like Bank, the full traffic light cycle takes so long, it’s easy to see why some cyclists ignore the lights. So, could a cycle ‘scramble’ phase be used? I.E. what would NL do?
Having read about it * I think “all-ways-green” or “cycle scramble” is an interesting idea. In theory it should scale well and it could possibly be implemented more cheaply / quickly that alternatives (changing signals and their phasing, rather than altering the existing road surface).
It *may* be (legally) possible in UK: https://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/conflicting-greens-the-implications-of-a-new-oxford-junction-for-simultaneous-green/
However this design not unanimously approved of in NL. See section part-way down this article: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/enschede-nominee-for-best-cycling-city/
It’s an invention from the North apparently – which sometimes goes its own way compared to the rest of NL infra (eg. urban cycle roundabout designs).
*On David Hembrow’s “aviewfromthecyclepath” blog.
Considering how poorly the Highway Code Hierarchy of Responsibility has been communicated and is operated in real life, anything at all subtle or complicated requires an order of magnitude more effort to explain and educate the road using public.
Not a show stopper, just a cost, but anything that triggers the ignorant would be an overall step backwards IMHO. So it’s necessary to pick something that is proven to work and understand why before doing the preparation to achieve that. My experience of Active Travel suggests that ordinary highway authorities would need enablement from a national centre of excellence…
Knowing how busy bank junction is with pedestrians, I don’t think this would help here. Even when the lights are green you will get lots of pedestrians walking out into the road.
Your reminder that between 19-28 pedestrians are killed each year in the UK by drivers going through a red light. And one every 5 years by a cyclist going through a red light.
Not saying that they shouldn’t stop bad cyclists, but I look forwards to the extensive press coverage of crackdowns on drivers going through red lights
Good. RLJ cyclists annoy the heck out of me.
RLJ is a confession of weakness.
Weakness of observation and planning to be in the right gear to move off easily, and to stop in good order. Physical weakness encourages reluctance to move off, which is a training opportunity..
Weakness in taking responsibility for observing the rules so safeguarding vulnerable road users. Hierarchy of Responsibility. Everyone has the right to travel safely. Wilful stupidity by some cyclists encourages the MSM toxicity that harms all cyclists..
Just don’t RLJ.
Agree with your concluding line (and also not in favour of creating deliberate exceptions with “left turn on red for some road users” either).
BUT:
“RLJ is a confession of weakness. … Weakness of observation and planning to be in the right gear to move off easily, and to stop in good order. …”
You say “weakness”, I see humans as usual, cutting corners and “saving energy” – which is a human universal! You might have luck appealing to self- designated “cyclists” proud of their strength and competence but that doesn’t help with the public at large (“just getting from A to B” – who currently “bend the rules” as drivers…)
Luckily there’s:
a) infra fixes. Like the Dutch just try harder to ensure that cyclists don’t need to stop (see eg. their junction design and increasingly “separate *networks* for separate modes”)
b) the internal gear hub – lets you change gear when stopped. Also great for “people who ride bikes but have no interest in cycling” as they’re very low maintenance (for users) and should last for casual riders’ “cycling lifetimes”.
I have absolutely no sympathy for people ignoring red lights or traffic signs.
That said, the irony of seeing the City of Lodon plods posturing and PRing on stuff they routinely ignore whilst on the bike or in cars is not lost on me (obviously not talking of blue lights situations)
the irony of seeing the City of London plods posturing and PRing on stuff they routinely ignore whilst on the bike or in cars is not lost on me
(there are loads more where that came from)
What about all the RLJ-ing drivers they’re bound to be ignoring because mentioning them would upset the Hyper-Junk Press (Mail, Torygraph, Sun etc)? Or is that an untrue allegation from somebody who has to live with the Bent, Inept and Idle Lancashire Police?
Cyclists: a red light means stop – you don’t have a choice.
Note that this means that every other force in the country could convict 0 cyclists of red light jumping and at current conviction rates for drivers (~20k/year), we would STILL be disproportionately prosecuting cyclists relative to rate of harm caused (about twice what would be proportional).
Note that afaik CoL is prosecuting proportionally for its area; Its just that they are basically the only force in the country doing significant RLJ enforcement against anyone, while having a LOT more cyclists.
Also the fix for this is prosecuting at least 5x as many motorists (i.e. other police forces carrying out red light enforcement at all…)
Traffic law is what it is mainly for safety reasons – so that ALL road users know what to reasonably expect. When folks do their own thing it all breaks down.
How many cyclists jumping red lights then get hit by other road users that are following the rules? What does that cost me as a tax payer? What does it cost those RLJ cyclists – and the innocent road users?
More enforcement is the answer. It could be self – financing, but the “all about me” culture has got the upper hand -and that’s politically not a winner just now…
You’re nearly there – current UK traffic law is what it is mainly for safety *and convenience (“capacity”)* of *motor traffic*, and then the safety of other forms of traffic with little regard to their convenience.
Don’t take it from me though, here’s some recent thought on this by an experienced civil engineer:
https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/02/traffic-signal-pie-double-standards.html
The Police: We are underfunded and understaffed.
Also Police: We prosecute and fine cyclists and OAP’s with plackards.
While I welcome any traffic safety enforcement, I wonder if this uptick in numbers caught is relative to a similar increase in cycling itself.
I doubt it.
Which leads me to think that the authorities/police are putting more resource into it.
So given the minimal return on improved safety in terms of reduced KSIs, I wonder if the authorities might want to consider increasing resource allocation to catch the bigger danger: ie dangerous drivers.
Nope. As it isn’t a vote winner.
KSI data are generated by Police Road Traffic Incident procedures and a classic case of measuring too little so not understanding the problem space.
Self reporting by road users, dash cams, cycle cams, glasses cams, CCTV, UAV cams are part of the record available to AI processing to get everything else. Maybe not yet, but soon. If DfT, MOJ & ACPO are educated to understand that they aren’t limited to Plod on the Beat.
Once that big picture is better documented and understood, improvement will be possible up to Think Zero and real Active Travel transformation.
Cyclists and e-bikists must abide by the traffic rules. If one can’t stand waiting at a red traffic light, they run instead.
When it comes the pedestrian’s safety, let’s the data do the talking :
Motor vehicles kill by far and away the most pedestrians, with an annual average of 416 deaths compared to fewer than four caused by cyclists.
Indeed, however the magical thinking that a pedestrian was harmed by a car, and not the driver supposedly in charge of it, creates a perception gap into which the much more obviously human cyclist will fall. Pedestrians can tell that a bicycle is at least as heavy as the rider, and moves at a human triggering speed range so they have time to look and be alarmed.
The motor vehicle isn’t recognisably human and moves at a speed so great that it’s filtered out as unfeasible.
In other words cycles are more alarming because they are more human, cars, not.
Sorry, no sympathy. We’re subject to the same law as motorists, and the same consequences if we break it.
no sympathy. We’re subject to the same law as motorists, and the same consequences if we break it
Great! All we have to do now is ensure that the motorists suffer some consequences instead of their offences being ignored under the police motto ‘everybody does it and we’re too busy’, and we’ve cracked it! What we’re getting now is disproportionate police action against (admittedly wrong-headed) cyclists and extreme leniency for motorists to please the Mail and Torygraph frothing dimwits
ttps://upride.cc/incident/fh18hdf_wyretaxi_dwlcross/
ttps://upride.cc/incident/j33bmd_transittrailer_redlightpass/
ttps://upride.cc/incident/pn72ooe_dacia_redlightpass/
ttps://upride.cc/incident/pe18ojj_insignia_redlightpass/
ttps://upride.cc/incident/a15tjv_bmwm4_redlightpass/
etc. etc. See if you can work out whether that red light for the ‘foot down to get out of trouble’ BMW M4 driver was ‘established’ enough, because the idle, useless tossers at Lancashire Constabulary couldn’t
Understand the intent here but … the first is an aspiration. And it ultimately makes more sense to consider that cyclists are *not* the same as motorists in many ways.
First: “the same law” – well there are different offences which apply to different modes ( until the “dangerous cycling” laws are in across the board, i guess).
It’s not quite “the same law” on a practical level either, as can be seen from the pattern of legal outcomes of motorist law-breaking (as wtjs reminds). (TBF there just aren’t many cases with cyclists as defendants coming to court. Of course that fact could be argued variously eg. because serious consequences to others are rare / because there are so few journeys cycled compared to those driven / “that just shows cyclists are getting away with it!”)
The second – cyclists are not subject to the same personal consequences to drivers if eg. they run a red light and crash. Being vulnerable road users the former are far more likely to be injured and killed…
While legally and in other respects the UK tends to view cyclists more as “mini cars” or “pedal-powered vehicles” the differences are so great we’d be much better adopting eg. the Dutch approach. It would be better to apply suitable infra and rules for 3 main categories: people on foot, “cyclists” * and motor vehicle users. (Yeah, the Dutch slice and dice further with “speed pedalecs”, 2 motor scooter categories etc)
* cyclists – including wheelchair users – although they can also be “pedestrians” – mobility vehicle users, roller skaters…
You’re joking, right?
You mean the same law that we have to get tax and insurance to ride our bikes? Or do you mean the cycling license that we all have to pass a test to get? Don’t forget about the mandatory eyesight requirements too.
The consequences are far harsher for cyclists when laws are broken and often, the police will make excuses for illegal driving and then refuse to uphold the law when it’s a driver at fault.
often, the police will make excuses for illegal driving and then refuse to uphold the law when it’s a driver at fault
No, no I can’t accept that ‘often’! – it’s pretty much invariably
“The rules apply to everyone” – except for in some more advanced/developed countries like Switzerland where for several years it’s been legal in most cities for cyclists to turn right on a red light (after stopping), but not for cars.
Or in NL where they do have this (“Rechtsaf voor fietsers vrij”) …
… BUT far more commonly where there are specific cycle paths (which is usual where the roads are “big enough” to have those lights in the first place) in many cases there is *no interaction with motor traffic at all* (right turn, going straight on across a t- junction). So there are simply no lights which apply to the cyclists!
I should add – we don’t see that in UK cycle infra because we still have the view of cyclists as “mini cars”. Not 100% sure of the legal side of this but pedestrians clearly still assume that at signalised crossings all other traffic should stop to let them cross. That’s *not* usually the case in NL.
Of course how that works in NL is where there is separate cycle infra there will almost always be a buffer area between the cycle path and the road. And at pedestrian crossings this is where pedestrians can wait (after dealing with crossing the cycle path) before crossing the motor traffic.
In the UK much cycle infra is just a slice of the existing motor vehicle carriageway (more or less “protected” or distinguished from it) so there usually isn’t this space, and the traffic lights are still on the “inside” of the cyclists so logically as well as legally they apply to them.
Explained better in video… https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/how-hard-is-it-to-cross-the-cycle-path/
I believe this could be done in the UK under current regs – at least Manchester does something like this with “Cyclops” junctions. Although those have part of the junction “inside-out” compared to NL, I believe with the idea of prioritising pedestrian visibility to motorists / being closer to the “desire line”?
in some more advanced/developed countries like Switzerland where for several years it’s been legal in most cities for cyclists to turn right on a red light (after stopping)
The Swiss really are pretty advanced. I was visiting a friend last night, and his daughter and her family live there. Their national grid can cope with much larger home photoelectric installations, and it’s illegal for children to be taken to school by their parents – they have to use the bus! Presumably, they’re allowed to take children to a bus stop somewhere.
The City of London police have been quiet sensibly targeting areas that are a problem with red light jumping, such as Bank junction (very high volumes of pedestrians), Farringdon road (where jumping a light on CS6 means you might get hit by turning traffic).
They are pretty visible, so if you don’t see them your observation skills are very poor.
Why this stands out is that the Met Police seem to do almost no similar checks (City Of London Police are better funded from the Corporation of London). I’d like to see more traffic police generally, but this would need more money for the Police.