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You now have all-revealing photos and Next Door.co.uk’s 79% Gosforth poll.

Cycle lanes are not the future. I have been trying to flag this up since 9 October 2014 when I first wrote to the Newcastle City Council with my complaint about proposed cycle lanes and red lines for Gosforth High Street, hitting the fan ever since.

There is now no need for more words, legal or otherwise.

Photographs show with total clarity that cycle lanes on Gosforth High Street that I have consistently objected to,( then marked by white and red lines, today marked by bollards,) make the pollution they were introduced to reduce, more not less; slow-moving traffic tailing back both ways even during lockdown an almost permanent feature of the High Street.

They do not encourage more people to make a “model shift” from car to bike that those responsible dream of.

There were few bicycles in the first place, and just as few today. Nationally in UK figures flatline. The vision of the authors of the plan, the cycling lobby Sustrans entrusted with the job of introducing it in Newcastle and endorsed by the Council, “1,232,177 additional cycling rides” is truly bizarre when measured against National Cycling to Work Stats in Newcastle up from 1,781 in 2001 to 3,223 in 2011.

Serious injuries to cyclists suppressio veri, suggestio falsi. RoSPA’s stats for DfT are drawn from the police, not from the NHS, with true figures best kept unknown.

Consultation, again in my own experience, a con plus salutation. Opacity, not transparency. Justice is seen to be done when it is not.

Recently, to try to make them acceptable, some cycle lanes on the High Street have been designated pedestrian ways to achieve social distancing in Covid-19, but few pedestrians walk in the gutter and, for the few cyclists around, they make cycling even more dangerous and unhealthy when they have to squeeze in between the pedestrian ways and the slow-moving buses, lorries, and cars.

Gosforth High Street is just one illustration of many throughout the UK. Only the Daily Mail defies Omertà.

Cyclists have a free license to ride their bikes on most roads, but they have a minority right to be there, not an equal one, and others, especially the emergency services, have a greater one. And we now have the unregulated e. Scooters at 15 mph with a license to injure.

Electric Vehicles are the future

In China, where once upon a time their roads were full of cyclists, there are already well over a million people with small affordable electric cars. Cycles, rest in peace!

130 million people in America are within a 10-mile drive of an EVGO fast charger. No Luddites there. No Sustrans!

Deserving better here, all those from whom there are little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Many of them.

I hope that one day students of law, politics and sociology will be able to read Kafka’s Cycle – slow death of a complaint where I chronicle all this, and lawyers will stop threatening to sue me for libel refusing even to read it.

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