Its all the students fault. Apparently

[John the Monkey]

I work in Cambridge and believe me the standard of student cycling is generally awful.

I find similar in Manchester, but I don't think this should mean that it's ok for motorists to shrug and carry on regardless.

This is one of the huge differences I saw between here and the towns I went through in Belgium and France. Cycling skill wasn't necessarily great there, (I saw lots of stuff that would have British motorists fuming in the letters pages of the local paper) but there is give and take on both sides, and seemingly a recognition from motorists that pedestrians and cyclists merit a degree of extra caution on their part. The attitude seems vastly different to the "well you're on the road, you take your chances" attitude prevalent here.

There's an interesting piece on Copenhagenize about how this attitude is constructed by road safety education - I'd go further, and say that traffic engineering and public policy reinforce it. The outcome is the indifference of the vast majority of British motorists to vulnerable road users, and a blame the victim mentality that has seen calls for kids to wear Hi-Viz while walking to school, etc etc.

 

[Cab]

I work in Cambridge and believe me the standard of student cycling is generally awful.

Awful to mediocre. About as good as the general standard of driving here.

 

[Bodger]

Speaking as someone who rides across two or three (it's hard to say as any building with a revolving door seems to have gained university status these days) university campuses to get to the office, I have to agree that it's not just cycling students. The number that just wander out into the road, earphones in ears, eyes glued to the phone in hand as they text away, always rises dramatically at this time of year.

Luckily most can't afford cars or wouldn't have anywhere to keep them.

At least at one of these campuses there is some cycle training available, but I'm not sure how well it is taken up. After all, if you are in the top 5% for intelligence in the country you don't need to be told how to ride a bike do you? ;-)

Having said all of that I still find the middles of Cambridge and Oxford much more pleasant to get around in than my own home town, despite the poor cycling and because of the amount of cycling.