Close to me in Cambridge, there is a thing called a guided busway. It’s a road exclusively for buses that has guide rails so the bus doesn’t have to be steered – it means that the road can be narrow enough to go on an old railway bed. Beside the busway is a shared path for bikes and pedestrians – it’s an incredibly good, safe route into town.
This excellent path recently acquired a speed limit for bikes of 15mph, complete with radar speed signs. Meanwhile, close to another place I’ve lived in Wandsworth in London, the police are using radar guns to fine cyclists exceeding a 12mph limit in some of the borough’s parks. I know of other examples. I’m beginning to suspect it might be becoming a thing.
Up till now speed limits in the UK, almost universally, have applied only to motor vehicles. For example, I once set off a speed camera while on a bike (near Hungerford in Berkshire) during a race. My sponsors actually got in touch with the police to see if we could have the photo for an advert. We did this totally confident I wasn’t going to jail, and the police didn’t query it, or even ask the obvious and reasonable road safety question, which was why was anyone organising a bike race down a hill through a 30mph zone?
Clearly there are places that it’s not sensible or safe to ride a bike at any great speed-where there are pedestrians or children playing, say. Most bike riders have traditionally slowed down, not least because as a bike rider you’re pretty vulnerable yourself. Naturally, a handful just blasted through as fast as they could as if it was a video game. But it’s usually been a minority and, well, if they didn’t aggravate you that way they’d only aggravate you some other way, so the official reaction has always been a shrug and a, “What can you do?”
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for the CW magazine every week.
Now things are changing. Thanks to e-bikes and illegally de-limited e-bikes, lots more people can achieve the speed required to be an arsehole for much less effort, and they can keep it up for much longer. It’s as if we’ve run a doping programme for morons. There are legions of people riding large, heavy e-bikes on busy shared paths with a very breezy disregard for everything around them, much the same way they drive. The best that can be said is that at least they’re not usually going faster than 15mph.
A much bigger issue is the number of illegal riders on really big fat-bikes – the kind of thing no one in their right mind ever tried to pedal. What speed limits are doing is conflating all this. Most of the nuisance, and the risk, is from something that’s already illegal. And someone who’s already riding an illegal bike, without insurance or tax, an MOT or a licence, and more than likely trying to keep to a schedule set by a horrible job, is probably not going to see a 12mph sign and think, “Oh my days, I must moderate my velocity forthwith.”
In practice most of the people with an instinct for obeying a speed limit aren’t going to be the people who were any sort of problem – morons will continue to moron, delivery riders will still need to earn enough to eat. Why am I so sure, you ask? I’ll refer to you our roads in general. And, as on the roads in general, enforcement will be minimal. Meanwhile, cyclists will continue to take abuse from everyone, from the local paper to the House of Lords, much of it because of a group who aren’t actually riding bicycles. Honestly, it’s time to start treating different things differently.
Riding too far was the norm for 40 years.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
GREAT INVENTIONS OF CYCLING: 1958-OVERTRAINING
Once upon a time, cyclists did not train. In the Victorian era, gentleman amateurs would have equated it with cheating; professionals just relied on their raw ability and something akin to practice.
Then we had the Edwardian era, when even a racing rider spent most of their spare time touring, covering mile after mile at a lovely relaxed pace. It was an ideal way to train, with riders following their instincts and never pushing too hard, while throwing in the occasional race for a bit of speed.
It was really only after touring died, after the Second World War, that riders started to train in a structured way. They did this by racking up the mileage. The training philosophy was simply that the further you rode, the better you were.
This meant that almost everyone was overtrained from 1960 till around the end of the 20th century. Some riders coped with this better than others. The ones who survived became professionals, the ones who didn’t became the most knackered group of amateur athletes in history.
Occasionally one of the pros suffered an injury and was forced to take a few weeks off, then discovered on their return that they had the most astonishing form. Happily for everyone else, without exception they thought, “Wow. Just think how good I’ll be when I get back to riding 700 miles a week,” and the problem went away.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
On Christmas Day 2023, a wife presented her husband with a pair of Castelli shorts that he’d recently mentioned. He seemed delighted. However, she noticed that they remained in a drawer, still in their packaging.
In July 2024, he again mentioned that model of shorts and said how much he’d like a pair. So in December 2024, she retrieved the shorts from the drawer, wrapped them, and handed them over again.
The whole process repeated in 2025, and he got them again last month. Still delighted. The stupid bit is that she got cross and told him, blowing the prospect of the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
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