Michael Moynihan: Wheel tribe needs to be reminded we are all ultimately pedestrians

We all need to take responsibility for each other on the road

Cyclists and drivers need to be reminded that pedestrians also use the spaces on and alongside roads.

The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you. — Jane Jacobs

I’m getting my explanations in early, because I’m torn between two options when it comes to deploying the couple of sentences above in real life.

The peaceful option is having Jane Jacobs’ thoughts on city life printed on cards and then handing those cards out to those who need to be reminded of this essential truth.

The less peaceful option involves a red-hot branding iron, with these exact words glowing on it, in close range when walking the streets of Cork.

An overreaction? Consider this for a typical morning.

Cycle lanes are, obviously, designed for cyclists but this doesn't always happen. Picture: Larry Cummins

Leave the house and get to the main road, where I have my first encounter with people parking their cars for the nearby school, when the word ‘parking’ means beaching a mammoth Panzer crossways on the footpath, thus making said footpath impassable. Not a tight squeeze. Not narrowing the way. Impassable.

Relax, though. The hazard lights are on, which means one can ... not pass, but the hazard lights are on.

Footpath impassable, so where next? Out onto the road?

A bad idea, with cyclists hurtling down the road which comes down a small hill.

They’re likely to toss out abuse as they go like the time long ago when someone — me — pointed out the irony of a cyclist behaving as though they owned the road and nobody else was entitled to use it, but the response was couched in language bad enough to make even that someone — me — pause.

Make your way down the sloping road and the next obstacle.

The man in the high-vis vest.

The building work going on at the bottom of the road is being done under licence from Narnia, or Middle-Earth, or Valhalla, or some such place where magic still exists. How else to explain the mystery of vanishing footpaths and roadways which come and go at random intervals? Here today, gone tomorrow.

And apart from magic, what else could account for the strange powers of the man in the high-vis vest? With a traffic cone or two, he can cause small children to risk their lives by crossing the street (see cyclists, above) after popping out from behind enormous cars (see parking, above) to the one fully extant footpath left on the far side of the road.

Then again, those children have already survived the traffic lights at the bottom of the road, an experience that would terrify a Masai warrior contemplating the rite of passage to manhood.

This is because our traffic lights, in common with those all over Cork, have been superseded by a communication issued to all commuters in the city.

That communication informs drivers that if they are next at the lights when they turn red then they have licence to roll through that stop signal anyway; anyone travelling around the city has surely noticed that this is now acceptable behaviour everywhere traffic lights are encountered.

It’s a rare red light in Cork that doesn’t shine gently on someone blithely sailing past it.

This is presumably an extension of the privilege enjoyed already by cyclists, for whom colour blindness on the green-red spectrum seems not only prevalent but mandatory.

The distance from my front door to those traffic lights takes approximately three and a half minutes to cover, but in that time a smorgasbord of lunatic road use can be experienced. If it can be survived then the aftermath is a bit like being on the phone while an action movie plays on a television nearby in super-fast-forward: flashes of light, speedy blurs and a sense of having been through something that had the potential to be very unpleasant.

I’m aware of the recent publicity about traffic in Cork, and the city council saying the existing city street network does not have further capacity to accommodate increasing private car usage.

Fair enough. The entire system is under pressure. People get frustrated when they can’t get where they want to go.

Can I remind our Lycra-clad cyclists and cocooned motorists, however, that there are others on, near or crossing the roads? People just like them?

A busy Cork City: We all have to navigate the streets. Picture: Larry Cummins

This is an unexpectedly serious point. Those who identify — with no sense of humour whatsoever — as cyclists or drivers may need to be reminded that they’re not odd hybrids, half-man, half-Raleigh. Or part-woman, part-SUV.

To the best of my knowledge, no cyclist rides their bike upstairs at bedtime to go to sleep. No driver parks neatly right next to the kitchen table for their evening meal. For significant stretches of the day, all must dismount.

When that happens even our cyclists and drivers must walk from one point to another and are probably mindful of others when they do so.

I’m sure most cyclists don’t treat the queue in the coffee shop like a traffic jam, strolling casually past the others stuck in line to get to the top with their order.

It’s safe to assume most drivers don’t stop and stretch out on the floor near the freezer in the supermarket, forcing everyone to walk around them as they say sweetly, “I’ll only be a minute”.

Why do they behave like totally different beings on the roads, then?

People consider Flann O’Brien’s great old routine about the policeman who eventually became part bicycle (because of the molecules transferring between him and his iron steed) a masterpiece of surreal humour.

To judge by the streets and roads of Cork it appears to be straight reportage.

The snarling unpleasantness encountered out on the streets is exaggerated here for comic effect, but not by much. Those who use public highways can probably give examples from their own experience of blatant disregard for others.

And that is the heart of the matter. Jane Jacobs pinpointed the challenge of urban life precisely when saying people need to take responsibility for each other, a challenge many of us seem to fail every day — and in an environment where we meet so many of our fellow citizens.

One of the obvious reactions to this modern plague would be to form some kind of vocal pressure group. It certainly hasn’t done the motoring industry or the cycling fraternity any harm.

But creating a pedestrians union misses the point entirely: how can you have a lobby group representing the welfare of absolutely everybody?

If those pounding the roads could just remember their wheels don’t give them a temporary derogation from humanity, that’d be a start.

Though based on my recent experiences, stopping at red lights would be even better.