Caught on camera: Video shows cyclists jumping the red light

Evening Standard

Londoners have taken to two wheels in record numbers to beat the Tube strike – but a significant minority of cyclists have been blatantly riding through red lights.An extraordinary two million trips are thought to have been made by bike on Monday, the first full day of an expected five-day Tube shutdown, according to London cycling commissioner Will Norman. Normally about 1.4m journeys are made by bike on weekdays.But the number of cyclists ignoring the rules of the road has also increased – a fact confirmed by video evidence gathered by The Standard on Wednesday morning – raising concerns within City Hall about the risk this poses to safety.We witnessed numerous occasions when cyclists paid little heed to red lights – or to pedestrians who were walking across their path with the “green man” illuminated.

Transcript

00:00Huge numbers of Londoners have taken to two wheels to get around during the tube

00:04strike but not all of them have been obeying the rules of the road. The

00:08Standard has spent Wednesday morning day four of the tube strike at a number of

00:13key junctions in central London. I'm here just now at Holborn, one of the most

00:17notorious areas for cyclists over the past decade. We've also looked at Oxford

00:22Circus at Bloomsbury, at Blackfriars Bridge and at Liverpool Street Station.

00:27And what have we found? Well, the vast majority of cyclists, certainly commuter

00:32cyclists, do seem to be stopping but there's a significant minority who pay

00:36no heed to the red lights and are going straight through pedestrian crossings

00:40putting themselves and in particular pedestrians at risk. Nobody should be

00:45riding through red lights, nobody's riding on the pavement, everybody who's

00:48riding a bike should obey the highway code. We have the police out there

00:51enforcing against this. We want everybody to be safe as they get around London.

00:55Can this almost be turned into a good thing, you know bad about the tube

00:59strikes but if people get to try cycling in London for the first time or cycling

01:03to work it may sort of change their lives? Look, tube strikes are bad news for

01:08London, they're bad news for businesses, they're bad news for Londoners. I'm pleased

01:11that some people have the opportunity to get around nevertheless but what really

01:16needs to happen is the tube be back up and running so that everybody can get

01:19around in the way that they want to. Now the number of people who have taken to

01:23bikes is probably one of the most notable things of this tube strike. Will

01:27Norman, the male cycling star, estimates that on Monday and Tuesday as many as

01:32two million journeys a day were made by bike although the weather was

01:36particularly nice in those days. The questions now remain about how to keep

01:40pedestrians safe and whether some cyclists are simply becoming a menace to

01:45other Londoners.

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