It’s time to talk about dangerous cyclists

Yesterday, I was walking on the pavement up Putney High Street when a man in his 20s came zooming past me on a bike, close enough that I felt it and jumped. It was 8am.

Within seconds and a hundred yards further up, just past Marks and Spencer where the pavement narrows, the same cyclist nearly took out a man in his 70s. The older man tried to get out the way, the cyclist swerved round him, slowed to yell abuse at him, and then carried on down the pavement.

I stopped to speak to the man he had almost hit. He was shaken, and he was angry, and he had every reason to be both. He had been walking on a pavement. “I don’t know what this country is coming to,” he said. “You take care.”

There have been a lot of reports recently about pedestrians and cyclists in Putney. How they don’t stop at red lights; how they are increasingly riding the pavement when there’s traffic; how mothers now tell their kids to wait for the Green Light before crossing but then tell them to look for cyclists before moving.

These reports are often met with aggression by cyclists themselves, as if there is only one kind of cyclist. So rather than rely on an anecdotal reports, we decided to dig into the data and see what is really going on. The answer is clear: we have a cyclist problem.

The line that is going the wrong way

The Department for Transport published its final road casualty figures for 2025 on 30 July, in a table called RAS0601. In that year, 234 pedestrians in Great Britain were killed or seriously injured after being hit by a cyclist. Ten years earlier the figure was 137. That is a rise of 71 per cent.

Over the same ten years, the number of pedestrians killed or seriously injured by every vehicle on the road put together went down, from 6,795 to 6,322. Pedestrians hurt by cars fell 13 per cent. Buses fell. Lorries fell. Almost everything fell.

The obvious answer is that more people are cycling now, and the department’s own traffic figures dispose of it. Cycling in Great Britain grew nine per cent over the decade, measured in miles ridden. The injuries grew 71 per cent. Adjust one for the other and the rate of pedestrians seriously hurt per billion miles cycled went from 41 to 64.

Take the lockdown years out entirely, because they distort everything, and compare 2019 with 2025. Cycling traffic up one per cent. Pedestrians seriously hurt by cyclists up 68 per cent.

More bikes does not explain it. How some of them are being ridden does.

The most careful work on this was done at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which went through police collision records for England covering 2005 to 2015. It remains the most recent published breakdown of where these collisions happen; the department publishes no equivalent for later years.

Of 763 pedestrians killed or seriously injured in collisions with bicycles, 197 were standing on a footway or verge when it happened. Another 183 were on a pedestrian crossing. Half of everybody seriously hurt by a cyclist was either on the pavement or crossing the road with permission to do so.

For pedestrians hit by motor vehicles the same figures are eight per cent and 13 per cent.

That gap is the argument, and it is not really about cyclists at all. It is about where. Cars hurt people in the road, which is where cars belong. Bicycles are hurting people on the pavement and at the crossing, which is to say in the two places where riding a bike is either illegal outright or requires stopping at a red light. The researchers said as much: few of these collisions happened in space designed to be shared, which points to riding on footpaths, which has been against the law since 1835.

And the people it happens to are older. Forty-two per cent of pedestrians seriously hurt by cyclists were over 60, against 22 per cent for motor vehicles. The average age was 50, against 36. Just under two thirds were women. The man outside Marks and Spencer was not an unlucky exception. He was the middle of the distribution.

Which brings me back to what parents have started telling their children: Wait for the green man. Then look for bikes. Not “look both ways”, which is what I was taught. look for bikes, specifically, after the light has told you it is safe to walk. When enough parents independently arrive at the same instruction, they are usually responding to something real.

It’s not about deaths

This is not a piece about people being killed. Cyclists were involved in the deaths of two pedestrians in the whole of Great Britain in 2025. The ten-year run reads three, three, one, six, four, one, none, four, one, two. There is no trend in those numbers and anyone claiming one is selling something.

Nor are cyclists the only line rising. The category the department files as “other vehicles”, which is largely where illegal e-bikes and e-scooters end up, rose 68 per cent over the same decade, almost exactly in step. The department has admitted it cannot reliably tell illegal electric motorbikes apart from ordinary bicycles in its collision figures at all. So the pavement problem people describe, bikes and e-bikes together, is one the official numbers cannot fully see.

There’s also no point in arguing cyclists are the enemy. I’m a cyclist. Most people on bikes in Putney are commuting, carefully, on roads that are frequently frightening to be on. The junction at Putney Bridge is its own long story. Someone riding nervously in a bus lane at 7.30am is not the same person who rides the pavement and shouts at a pensioner for being in his way, so let’s not get pulled into aimless arguments and miss the point.

What the figures show is narrower and harder to dismiss: a sustained rise in serious injury, concentrated on pavements and crossings, falling hardest on older people, and not explained by there being more cycling.

Nobody is counting

The dangerous behaviour of a small number of cyclists (although it does seem a much larger number don’t think red lights apply to them) is something that is an increasing problem but one which we have yet to tackle on a societal level.

E-bike rentals are a remarkable innovation, especially in congested London, but they bring their own problems as hundreds of thousands of people jump on them wherever they find them, go faster with less effort thanks to modern battery technology, and then drop them off wherever they wish, unencumbered by the need to lock them because it’s not their property.

There was a time, not that long ago, when children were expected to take a ‘cycling proficiency’ test before they were allowed to cycle on the road. That was replaced by ‘cycling awareness’ tests where problem solving was put ahead of instruction. You can debate which was better but there are three things that studies have consistently found:

• Any kind of training and test will result in significant and prolonged cycle performance and safety
• Training over time is significantly better than intensive classes
• Training on public roads is much more effective than on simulated roads

There is another fact – a more worrying one – the number of children that have been trained how to ride has fallen dramatically over the years: in the 1970s it was a clear majority; in the 1990s it was at 40%; and in the mid-2000s it was down to 25%.

Across the UK, and especially in London, policymakers are pushing hard and investing heavily in greater cycling – and for lots of good reasons – but that drive has not been met by a similar investment in training and safety and we are increasingly paying the price for it.

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they to every

Should every child be taught to cycle safely on the road before they ride on it?

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree
• Not something I have a view on

In the 1970s most children took a cycling test. By the mid-2000s it was around a quarter. Meanwhile cycling itself has been pushed hard by government and councils.

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Time to enforce?

It may be time for local authorities to recognise the trend and step up their efforts. The Putney police recently run a successful effort to stop and seize overpowered e-scooters. Residents commented on how nice it was not to have these vehicles zooming around close to them walking. But they were illegal and most pedal-powered e-bikes are not.

The council does enforce cycling rules in one place. Wandsworth’s parks police run a 12 miles per hour limit on Tooting Bec Common, brought in after residents complained about speeding riders. But that is a park. The pavement outside it is somebody else’s problem, and at the moment it is not clear whose.

We have no stats on the number of cyclists stopped for going through a red light even though it is illegal – in large part because no one is being stopped for doing so. It is currently, in the Met’s eyes, not a priority.

Riding a bicycle on the pavement is an offence under section 72 of the Highways Act 1835. It applies to adults and to children, though guidance to officers has long been that discretion should be used where the rider is a child or is plainly riding out of fear of the traffic. Enforcement is by fixed penalty notice and it is discretionary. Nobody is obliged to issue one, which is rather the point.

It can be done. South Wales Police ran a seven-week operation in Cardiff, one day a week, stopping riders on pavements and issuing fixed penalty notices, because residents asked them to. Seven days of policing over seven weeks. That is the scale of policing we need if we are going to make headway and turn what is an increasing problem into something that society makes plain will not be tolerated.

It is not a new task: when seatbelt rules were introduced, resistance to wearing them was gradually enforced until it became the norm. Public safety ads were produced and published everywhere. When new drink-driving laws were introduced, the same approach was taken – awareness campaigns, gradual warnings and then fines and punishment.

Both cases responded to public safety outcries. The bigger question is: are we there now with dangerous cycling? The existence of this article would suggest yes.

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the the on

Should the police start enforcing the law on pavement cycling and red lights?

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree
• Not something I have a view on

Riding on the pavement has been an offence since 1835 and jumping a red light is illegal, but enforcement is discretionary and Wandsworth publishes no figures for either.

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Dangerous or antisocial cycling can be reported to the Metropolitan Police on 101 or through the force’s online reporting tool. If anyone was hurt, report it as a collision. If the rider was on the pavement, say so, because that is the detail that makes it an offence rather than a complaint.

Have you had a recent run-in with a badly behaved cyclist? Let us know about it.