A truly amazing video has gone viral which features an incident between a cyclist and a London fire truck. Depending your point of view (which, in reality, is determined by whether you’re a cyclist or not) the video shows a cyclist almost being killed by a driver in a fire truck who didn’t care one bit that the cyclist was there, or more likely, the video shows a cyclist who has pure shit for brains.
However, Donnachadh McCarthy, a spokesperson for the controversial cycling lobby group Stop Killing Cyclists, says anyone who finds this incident funny is entirely part of the problem.
“This bike rider was almost killed! What sort of sick demented person would find something like that funny?” he asks. “This rider is someone’s father, someone’s brother, someone’s son! He is a victim. He is a victim of the relentless ongoing murder attempts by thousands of motorists every single day as they unleash their two tonne killing machines onto the innocent public!”
Which brings us to a video filmed by a London commuter named GRBiker. When you ride motorcycles the action comes fast and furious sometimes, which is why a lot of them wear GoPros on their helmets nowadays.
Arranging an interview with Donnachadh McCarthy (the nominal leader of the Stop Killing Cyclists lobby group) provided an insight into what a typical cycling lobbyist sees compared to what most people see. Watching the GRBiker video with him was illuminating.
“Did you see that? There, right there! Did you see it?” asks the fuming McCarthy. “It was on purpose. The driver did that on purpose. He was trying to kill that bike rider! It’s so obvious when you know what to look for. We see this sort of thing every single day. The driver has no excuse, he knows he has a blind spot and he should have found a way to ensure that bike rider wasn’t in his blind spot!
“This is why we started our lobby group Stop Killing Cyclists.” he continues. “This carnage has to end. The only way forward for every civilised nation is to ban motorised vehicles and to force people on to bicycles instead. People who ride bicycles are saving the planet.”
When McCarthy was tested on that claim he immediately became confrontational. After having it put to him that India and China alone produce 38% of the world’s greenhouse emissions, we were told quite unexpectedly that our meeting was immediately over.
Describing Donnachadh McCarthy in just a few words is not an easy task. He's undeniably charismatic, which explains why he has so many followers. But the words 'complex' and 'unpredictable' also come to mind too.
For example, consider London’s recent experiment with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
While ostensibly concerned with cycling safety, McCarthy jumped on board the LTN advocacy bandwagon during 2020 – pointing out to all and sundry that Low Traffic Neighbourhoods reduce pollution. They don’t of course – the pollution merely gets shunted two streets away onto the closest main roads – which are now more congested than ever. As soon as the wind changes the pollution comes straight back. Not unexpectedly, anyone who dares to disagree with McCarthy gets an almost comical display of apoplectic wrath.
However, if you’re a political opportunist like McCarthy is, such obvious logic doesn’t mean anywhere near as much as telling people what they want to hear – the goal being to keep building that follower count. It’s always about the follower count.
The problem however is old tweets never die. And while McCarty might be all righteous and sanctimonious about motor vehicle pollution in 2021, just five years ago he was quite happy to reminisce about his former Jensen Interceptor – a car which (for those who don’t know) has a whopping big lump of a V8 in it, and it’s lucky to crack 10mpg!
And thus we see the dangers of banking all your fame on being righteous and sanctimonious. Sooner or later, old Tweets tend to come back and haunt you. It is perhaps a delicious irony that Donnachadh McCarthy. a man who claims to be all about sticking up for the common man, is actually supporting a road traffic scheme which rewards London’s wealthy elite at the expense of the poor.
Of course, the problem the Stop Killing Cyclists movement faces is the fact they are the people who invented the extremely unpopular "cyclist die in".
One of our contributing editors at Single File Please, Rob Scott, is a former racing cyclist and is also a former resident of London. When we first asked Rob about the Stop Killing Cyclists movement this is what he he had to say.
“The people who buy into the Stop Killing Cyclists rubbish are idealistic fools,” Rob told us. “The vast majority of them get their kicks from hanging out on social media 10 hours a day, searching the internet for recreational outrage as their primary source of entertainment.
“The problem London faces is it’s just so overcrowded,” says the adopted Aussie import. “That’s why my wife and I moved our family down here about 20 years ago. The road system in London is so over saturated it’s reached the point where it’s relentlessly strangled at least 12 hours every single working day. The entire road system comes to a standstill from 7am to 7pm, Monday to Friday.
“And then you’ve got these twits on bicycles making out they’ve all been killed at the same time in one spot by some mythical attack from outer space. Which only makes the traffic worse. They just don’t get it. The issue isn’t infrastructure. The issue isn’t education. The issue is over saturation and too much population density.
“When you have ten million people trying to use a road system on a daily basis which is capable of carrying at best, only five million people, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realise there’s going to be a shit fight over scarce resources. But the Stop Killing Cyclists people don’t think that way. They insist on living in London, and they want to enjoy the money and the jobs which comes with living in London, but they’re not prepared to put up with the population density which comes with it.”
