I’ve cycled through london a few times. I’m not a fan of the tube, and I always have my trusty brompton with me, so when I have to get across London I’ll typically go on two wheels. When I cycle across London, every time I pull up at traffic lights, a flock of cyclists whizz past me.
I can understand this, you know. In busy traffic, in a car, you just resign yourself to crawling along. On a bike, though, it always seems that you should be able to nip through and around the traffic, sneak down the sides of the jammed lanes, and keep going at a sensible pace. So if you’ve been caught up in the jampacked bus lanes for a while, it’s tempting to hop through a few lights to catch up with yourself.
Me, I wait at the lights, there in London. But—and I never admitted this, if anyone asks—I jump lights occasionally.
I started doing it in Lincoln. I used to reach a set of lights at 9am on a Sunday morning which would not go green unless a car approached them. My bicycle apparently wasn’t detected by them. And, at 9am on a Sunday morning, there weren’t too many cars approaching those lights. So I got in the habit of looking around and then hopping across.
When I was working in Cambridge and living in a village a few miles out, I often used to ride home from in the wee sma’ hours. One of the great things about cycling at that time was: all the traffic lights would change for me as I approached them. Cambridge does this much better than Lincoln or Southampton seem to. I’ve not had so many late nights in Southampton (well, Zepler closes at 11pm), nonetheless I’ve more than once found myself sitting tapping my foot at the lights on an empty road. This feels terribly frustrating, and if it is late at night, and I can neither see nor hear any traffic, I might just nip through those lights.
There’s one other case where I tap my foot and mutter, and that’s lights onto a left turn. A few such lights have cycle filter lanes, especially if there’s a dedicated cycle lane. If the cycle lane is on the pavement there’s no problem at all. Some left turnings (like the one at the top of Bullar Road), there’s no cycle lane and the cars have to move out a bit to avoid cyclists. But there are a number of places where I feel I could quite safely nip around the corner. When I do it (not that I admit to doing it, of course), I nudge the bicycle into the road a little so the cars can see what I’m thinking of, and then wait for a slight gap in approaching traffic, so I’m not cycling
right into the side of something, and then I slide around the corner, keeping in close until I’m well settled among the traffic.
Oh, and what’s with those funny ~5m stretches of cycle path that hop you around the pedestrian lights, on the avenue leading up to London road? All they seem to do is encourage cyclists to run over the pedestrians crossing!
