No one seems to know the true origin of the famous quote: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”. Mark Twain attributed it to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli – the American novelist was almost certainly wrong, but that doesn’t stop all kinds of people and publications who should know better from bandying it about with erroneous accreditation.
And this kind of proves the underlying truth in the sagacious saying: you can’t unquestionably believe anything, let alone everything, you read or hear. Eighty three percent of statistics are made up. Spin and fake news have been around forever, and even if a set of figures looks legit, the order in which they’re presented bends the light that reflects back off them.
Anyway, did you see British newspaper The Times this week? In a piece under a nice calm, not-at-all-sensationalist headline – ‘Do police in your area let reckless cyclists ride roughshod?‘ – the paper proceeds to allege that most police forces around Britain don’t tell law-breaking bikers off anymore, let alone fine or prosecute them.
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Intrepid journalists at the paper have discovered, by lodging freedom of information requests to police forces in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, that the number of fixed-penalty notices for misdemeanours such as running red lights or riding on the pavement have gone down in the last year. This is everywhere except in the City of London (where the force have their own cycle squad), despite the number of cyclists and cycling trips purportedly going up. As ever, riders of electric bikes are the target of the most ire, but there isn’t a huge amount of distinction going on.
I’m not going to lie, there are some interesting stats in there, and the stories and quotes from entities representing vulnerable people – especially those who are blind or partially sighted – about the horrors of crossing the road when you’re not sure if a bike (or any vehicle for that matter) is going to stop when it should, are compelling.
We would never condone cyclists running reds, bombing along pavements or any other selfish and entitled behaviour. It’s wrong, and we call it out regularly. And we also applaud decent policing initiatives when they’re announced, as they were by the aforementioned City of London’s cycling squad last week, with the launch of an campaign aimed at properly educating errant cyclists.
But, neither are we going to sit here and accept that cyclists are the real problem when it comes to safety on the road. Because that is miles from the truth, no matter how you want to spin it.
The various police forces named in The Times report have not individually responded to the implication that they are ‘letting reckless cyclists ride roughshod’ over their patch, and neither have they come back to us when we reached out for comment, but it’s no secret that resources are stretched thin, and have to be allocated to areas of highest priority.
As a City of London Police spokesperson told Cycling Weekly last week, “Even with a dedicated cycling team, we know we’re not going to fine our way out of this, so we’re looking for innovative ways to bring about behavioural change and make an actual difference.”
So perhaps, like their colleagues in the Square Mile, police elsewhere in the country are trialling new methods of law enforcement or measures that encourage behavioural change other than persisting with ineffectual penalty notices. Or maybe they have concluded they need to address other issues altogether.
Because, buried right at the bottom of The Times piece is another set of statistics and figures that put a different slant on this story. They come from Adam Tranter, a former cycling and walking commissioner for the West Midlands, who points out that: “The reality is that the biggest danger to pedestrians is overwhelmingly drivers of motor vehicles. On average, more pedestrians are killed each year by cows than by cyclists.”
“By comparison, in 2025 alone, 364 pedestrians were killed and 5,960 seriously injured, almost all of them hit by drivers of motor vehicles. In an ideal world, everyone would follow the rules of the road but with limited policing resources and competing priorities, if you want to improve road safety, it does not make sense to focus much police attention on cycling behaviour.”
