The weather’s fabulous. The sun’s shining, it’s warm, the birds are a’singin’, Spring has definitely sprung round my way. So the electric bike gets a bit more air than it does in February. In that I’m prepared to use it. More than ‘prepared’. Eager. And I use it to save the planet. Tony Blair can bang on all he likes about our continual need for fossil fuels, but me and Ed Miliband are ‘on message’. We just manifest it in different ways. Me by being a morally superior e-bike rider, full of righteous indignation. And Ed by being the stupid tosser he’s always been, maintaining his position about 9 months behind whatever’s going on now. It’s a good partnership.

And I view car drivers on the capital’s roads with scorn. I give them a HOW DARE YOU??? look, as I speed past them on the pavement. Because everyone should be on a bike. Everyone. Like Holland. Like Cambridge. Ban all cars (except mine) and force everyone onto 2 wheels. At least in the summer.

That might be ‘the dream’ from an eco perspective. End the congestion, improve air quality and approach ‘net zero’ as if you really care.

Yet from a practical perspective, that actually represents a nightmare. Because when I’m on my bike, nothing really stops me. I go round cars, through red lights, in-and-out of Sainsburys if I have to, circumnavigate any pedestrians and ignore roadworks. The only thing which causes me any problem (‘problem’ = slowing down) is other bikes.

You’re on a cycle lane cruising along as fast as the bike’s ‘governor’ will let you, and in front is an old person cycling a 20 year-old Rayleigh on which the gears have given up. They wobble across the lane, avoiding pot holes, as they should, but making overtaking impossible.

You arrive at a set of lights where you do actually have to stop, like to cross the Euston Road (its a very brave or generally very dead cyclist who’d go through the red light there) and there’ll be 17 bikes waiting. 9 of them Lime bikes, obviously, the rest a mish-mash of pedal power. The light changes and it’s a fucking mess of overtaking bikes jostling for position. With me the biggest jostler because my bike is precisely 1.27 mph faster than a Lime bike. But getting past them all can be challenging.

So we ‘need’ a City full of bikes. But we certainly don’t fucking want one. So what we actually ‘need’ is no bikes except mine. Then I’d be happy.

Happy riding. Just not in my City.

A xxxx