Colm O'Regan: Cycling courtesy to combat rage-bait

Colm O'Regan: "When we, who live and work close enough to commute by bike, do so, we make more room on the road for people who have no choice. With that one simple sentence he draws a common cause. Some people have to drive. For reasons that are no one else’s business."

Warning: may contain traces of cycling. (Rage-bait is the Oxford Word of the Year so I’m just letting you know now.)

Robin Kilroy is a pilot at Dublin Airport. He cycles there on an e-bike along some of the terrible back roads of North Dublin. He posts his experiences on his Facebook page.

Even if you’re not familiar with north county Dublin, every city in Ireland has these roads. They have that lovely combination of traffic jam, ditches and darkness. All of the congestion of the city with all the danger of the country! So Robin gets close passed by arseholes who end up stuck in a queue 200 yards further ahead.

Unlike other cycling social media accounts, he generally doesn’t get into rows. And he doesn’t report them to the gardaí. Perhaps that’s a personal choice but also, given that the Garda IT department is keeping the spirit of 2008 alive with its website design and lack of a video portal, I’m guessing it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

What he does do is something that is grist to my mill. He changes the tone of the discussion between cyclists and motorists. Its not a zero sum game. The result is that the discussions underneath his posts are remarkably low in nutterdom. It’s as if by not rage-baiting he has cast an invisibility spell over the discussion so that the bots that feed off rage and the algorithm which promotes the most batshit comments, pass over, sniffing suspiciously like a blind dragon.

He's a cyclist but not so much a devotee that he can’t broach topics you don’t see mentioned that much: Like what we as cyclists can do as fellow road users. Not about illumination or rules of the road... more about the courtesy thing. I sometimes think that road-courtesy isn’t expected of us but we can help too!

For example, when there’s a queue of traffic behind him and he’s holding them up, Robin will pull in and let them pass. At a cost of giving up precious hard-won momentum and a minute or so, he reduces the simmering rage in the people in the queue behind him. Whether they should be enraged is a matter for their time management and their therapist but that’s not the point. The cost to him is less than the benefit to others.

I think he’s dead right. Although we cyclists are more vulnerable, it doesn’t mean we can’t participate in the general good will on the road.

The roads can be ragey but also they are a place where humanity, unbidden, does a lot of favours for strangers: 

• We let people out in front of us.
• We pull in to let a nutter with italicised number plates pass us on The Straight Bit. We flash lights and put on hazards in warning.
• We do favours for strangers all the time.

And speaking of the group effort, Robin said something else.

When we, who live and work close enough to commute by bike, do so, we make more room on the road for people who have no choice. With that one simple sentence he draws a common cause. Some people have to drive. For reasons that are no one else’s business.

There is no point in sneering at motorists for their choice. But equally there is no benefit in motorists treating cyclists badly.

It might not look it but we are doing you a favour. The more of us who cycle because we can, the more space there is on the road for motorists.

And we’re not competing for parking!

I always think pro-cycling campaigns should really big-up the parking angle. Parking anxiety is real. You’re worried about a parking space right now. I can tell. And it IS gone.

So let’s have more chats about where both sides win.