One Reason Why I hate Cars, and a brief note on Lifestyle Choices

On Sunday morning a woman rushed out of a side road in a quiet Oxford suburb, violently knocked me off my bicycle and mangled the machine I was riding.

Quite understandable, some of you may think. It's the only sort of treatment I would understand. But in fact the person involved had nothing against me, didn't know me, and was quick to apologise for the hurt (even quicker and more comprehensive,  once she had been given quite a large piece of my mind). She also paid for the damage to be repaired.

But, as some of you will have guessed,  there was another element in all this – an element which makes an apparently shocking and inexplicable event make perfect sense.

My assailant was driving a car.

Now, like most experienced cyclists, I treat all cars, vans, lorries and all drivers with hostile suspicion. It is the only safe thing to do.  You must assume that they are either asleep, sending texts, yammering illegally on their phones,  drunk, drugged or homicidal. Many of them are not any of these things, but enough of them are to make this the only sensible attitude to take. I might add that I am even more terrified of other cyclists, who as well being as daft and unpredictable as drivers, are consumed with self-righteousness and so able to do things that no White Van Man would contemplate, such as speeding straight through red lights.

Even when I am riding to church early on Sunday morning, through one of the most peaceful and traffic-free sections of suburb in the world, North Oxford, I maintain this carapace of hostility and super-caution. When I saw the car involved, halted at the corner, I attempted to make eye contact with the driver and thought I had done so.  Even this doesn't always work. Once in the past I was so worried by the person's glazed expression that I assumed he was going to run me over anyway – fortunately, for he promptly drove straight out at me, and I was able to stop with inches to spare and to call out to him 'I knew you were going to do that!'. It was only then that he realised I was there at all. I'm not sure (see below) that he cared much, even then.

This time, all my precautions failed. I made eye contact, I rode on cautiously, she promptly turned right and accelerated quite hard into my front wheel, apparently not braking or reacting at all until she (or rather her vehicle)  had chewed it up into a sort of steel-and-rubber  Moebius strip. I did try to yell a warning, but this was cut off as I flew sideways, landing heavily on my left side, grazing, bruising or otherwise hurting my shoulder, elbow and hip. I still ache, and will do for some time. My assailant paid for a taxi to take me on to church, the only way I could cover the remaining three miles in time, but I must admit that I wasn't exactly in a  State of Grace when I got there – a position made in no way better by being asked to sing one of the worst hymns in the book (not quite as bad as 'Lord of the Dance', but very, very nearly). But I digress.

Now, if an individual had attacked me in this way without a car, then it would have been a shocking assault that would have ended in court. But as my attacker was car-borne, it's no such thing. Why is this so? Why are car-borne assaults of this kind deemed so trivial and understandable? Why can people knock you flying, mangle your property, and then think it reasonable, if they were in a car at the time,  to say they were terribly sorry, they don't know how it happened, they've never had an accident before, etc , etc, etc.

Well, you could say, because my attacker didn't mean to do it. Well, I can't tell you how little I cared about this as I rose irritably from the Tarmac to assess the damage. I was ( I freely confess) fantastically, elaborately, relentlessly rude to the culprit (though without once resorting to swearing) , ending by suggesting in all sincerity that she considered giving up driving hereafter. My own personal view is that no healthy resident of Oxford needs to use a car in the city at all. Rather the contrary.   But I know this is a minority position.

The fact was that she simply wasn't paying attention. It was a bright morning, the air was clear, I am reasonably large and clearly visible at a range of ten feet, she had stopped, she turned *right*, something you never do without care.  I don't know (and don't much care) if she was daydreaming or was transfixed by something on her car radio. The fact was, she wasn't ( as is the case with most human beings for much of the time) fit at that moment to be in charge of a fast-moving steel and glass box weighing about a ton. I might daydream on my bicycle (though I would never, ever use headphones) , but if I do the risk is mainly to me. I might daydream as I walk (once again, I'd never use headphones, though I might well make a phone call) . Once again, the risk is almost entirely to me. Yes, I can see that it could cause danger to others, but it would be very rare ,and would mainly be the result of the large number of motor vehicles on the roads.

In the case of the driver the danger is almost entirely to others, and hardly at all to him or her. Seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, side-impact protection, airbags and the rest have in the past few years made the occupants of cars incredibly safe in almost anything short of a head-on collision.

I think this has encouraged a subconscious carelessness which is really, really important where there are pedestrians or cyclists within range. For they, unlike the car-borne,  are not safer. On the contrary. Drivers of cars, and even buses, accelerate and brake more violently, drive faster, go round corners as if they could see round them, when they can't,  and take less care because of these safety devices which surround them. The risks to us soft targets increase. I was surprised how badly I and the bike were bashed, at what must have been a very low-speed impact. They are also just that bit more careless than they otherwise would be.

I think are roads are statistically safer largely because soft targets, particularly child cyclists, have almost entirely retreated from them. But the roads are not really safer. It's just that people have learned to avoid them unless they themselves go out in armour, and have narrowed their lives as a  result.

I also suspect that even the nicest person, given the measure of pure power which is available in a car, becomes instantly more selfish and less considerate once behind the wheel. Cars are advertised as providers of power, and if anybody cared to do comparative tests on aggression and selfishness, I think they would find that car-driving provided primary evidence of Lord Acton's maxim that 'power tends to corrupt'. Good heavens, even a bicycle can do this (you should hear me ring my bell and make sarcastic remarks when dozy persons, apparently unable to grasp the concept involved,  amble heedlessly on to the extremely clearly marked cycle path in Hyde Park. The problem is that I enjoy doing so ).

Anyway, this is just one of a dozen reasons why I wish cars had never been invented. Their benefits, such as they are, don't begin to counterbalance the damage they do, the ugliness, noise and desolation they bring to city and countryside alike. But perhaps it's most important of all that they make their drivers worse people and turn nice middle-class ladies into people who violently assault innocent passers-by on the street, as happened to me.  I hardly drive at all now because I just can't stand the responsibility and also because I am quite ready to admit (which many others ought to do but won't for reasons of pride)  that I am not very good at it and am not really fit to be trusted with today's machines, both more powerful and more falsely reassuring than the ones I learned to drive in.

 

 

On the question of Lifestyle choice, I'd like to repeat here something I posted as a comment on the 'Kickboxing and Scotland' thread:

In answer to Mr Bumstead, first of all the post was lengthy because I was making a rather subtler point than he gives me credit for, which took longer to explain than the crude one (which he would have preferred me to have made) would have taken. I suggest he reads what I said once more.

He says : 'Your position seems to be that homosexuality should be legal but that all public forms (e.g marriage) should not be allowed and now someone adopts a political position merely by disclosing their sexuality? So for you the only acceptable homosexual is one who is invisible? Otherwise, merely by stating their sexuality, they are inviting a political confrontation? I'm sure she doesn't want to turn you into a lesbian- neither, I suspect, does she have any interest in political arguments you could put forward to tear up her pink members card.'

No, I mean what I said, no more and no less, that deliberate disclosure of a homosexual orientation is a political act. This is a fact. My other opinions on this subject (readers should rely on my own descriptions of my views, to be found in my books and past articles, rather than on Mr Bumstead's inaccurate and propagandist description) have nothing to do with the question, and I am not discussing them here. In fact, I am not discussing them anywhere again, precisely because of the silly misrepresentation that invariably follows.

For instance, Peter Mandelson never stated that he was homosexual and was quite angry when others said it on his behalf. There are of course many others whose identities we do not know who have kept such things private in the past, in all three major parties. .

In my view it is a culturally and morally radical act, generally associated with the radical left. When we still had one more-or-less culturally and morally conservative party, it would have been quite unlikely that any member of it would have done this. The fact that we no longer have any such party does not mean that we no longer have any such body of opinion in the populace.

I think it can also be argued, without expressing any opinion on sexuality at all, that a politician who wanted to be Prime Minister, or indeed Scottish First Minister, might hesitate before taking this step. Please read what I say in the post about the *fact* that parties seeking parliamentary majorities, whatever their stated policies on the subject, tend to shy away from such actions, and themselves to marginalise their members who take such actions.

Mr 'W' asks :' You describe homosexuality as a 'lifestyle choice'.Does one 'choose to be gay'?'
This is the result of clumsy wrtiting on my part. I should have made it clear that I meant that publicly proclaiming a homosexual orientation was a lifestyle choice. Nothing could induce me to get into the argument about how sexual orientation is determined (though Matthew Parris did once write something rather interesting about that, which I quote in'The Cameron Delusion' ).