When the drilling stops...

The Sudden Silence of Jeremy Vine

I live on a street in London like many thousands of other London streets. My house is semi-detached, one of six built to an identical specification around 150 years ago. With my neighbours to our left, we share a party wall.

Since they moved in some years ago, they have set about completely renovating their property from top to bottom. It has been unfathomably expensive, I would imagine, and incredibly noisy. For years, we have grown accustomed to the sound of angle grinders, hammers, saws and drills, even at weekends. Then suddenly, their work was done and our little part of our street has fallen silent.

It is an intense relief.

Jeremy Vine and I, a little younger than 150 years old, are like two semi-detached houses on the same street. The metaphorical road we live on leads from a world built for and dominated by the omnipresence of cars, to a far quieter world in which people get around for the most part under their own steam, on foot or by bike. That is our shared ambition.

And like the houses on the street, we are built the same, he and I. He is a few years my senior, but not by much. He is white, middle class, male and privately educated. Like me, he was a bit of a mediocrity at University (we both got 2:2s), and, again like me, he messed around on stage as a student. Then he ended up on the telly, as did I. We truly are semi-detached.

We have also both discovered the power and pleasure of riding bikes to get from A to B, and are both advocates for active travel. Though here is where the point of difference arises. Jeremy has deployed a bewildering and noisy set of power tools to get his house looking just right. I have moved in, and can’t really be arsed to make too many changes. I think I have taken this metaphor as far as it will go.

I have never met Jeremy, although I have a dim recollection of having exchanged messages once or twice with him over something to do with bikes. I haven’t ever listened to his Radio 2 show, because I don’t listen to Radio 2 (unless it’s the middle of the night and I am no the M4 driving home from Minehead). And I haven’t ever seen his TV show, as I don’t really watch telly (and don’t own one).

I am sure that Jeremy is really good at what he does, though. TV is cutthroat, and he has had a long stint, seemingly, at the top of a very rewarding game. That doesn’t happen by chance.

So, I only come across Jeremy’s public persona inasmuch as I have often seen his cycling videos online. In case you are not aware, Jeremy has been campaigning for years about cycling safety, and more pertinently, driver standards. On a semi-daily basis he has uploaded carefully edited sequences, filmed from a 360 degree helmet camera, of incidents which he has been observed, or been involved in, during his cycle commutes around London. He then adds graphics, music and his own narration, until they end up rather polished little productions, of perfect internet-ready length.

Normally, the point Jeremy makes in these films is about driver standards. He correctly highlights aggressive and bad driving, such as close passes and dangerous left turns. Often he includes his own verbal exchanges from the road with car drivers he has clashed with. Sometimes, his narration will invite a discussion about the rights and wrongs of certain driver behaviour. And boy, does he get “discussion”.

The temperature of the comments, the wall-to-wall abuse he receives, the extreme levels of anger and the threats of violence which come his way are truly astonishing. I have no idea how he has lived with it all for as long as he has. But yesterday, he announced that he is stopping. He’s had enough, and I don’t blame him for that. The drills and saws, the angle-grinders and hammers of his online toolkit have fallen silent, and peace has returned to the space next door.

Jeremy is almost always right. What he says, 99 times out of a hundred, is correct. He flags up dangerous driving, and explains why it is threatening to a person riding a bike. The statistics, of course, make his case for him.

But, and, to my mind this is a serious but: just because he’s right, it doesn’t mean that he’s right. Respectfully to Jeremy, whose intentions were impeccable, I think he got it wrong. Here’s why.

Cycling is fun. It is liberating. It is a tremendous, life-changing activity. It puts a smile on your face. Jeremy’s videos, frankly, would put the fear of God into you.

If you were vaguely considering making the “modal shift” as active travel geeks refer to ditching the car in favour of a bike (something I have literally done), would Jeremy’s polemical videos persuade you, or put you off? Would they be more or less likely to encourage you?

Experience is experience, and I have no grounds for suggesting that Jeremy’s is any less valid than mine. But his is also no more valid than mine. And my experience of criss-crossing London by bike over the last twenty years (I am about to hop on the bike and head for Camden Town from Lewisham) is far more benign than Jeremy’s, or at least the edited version of Jeremy’s that he presents online. I tend to ride on back routes where I can, have got to know the safer roads, and, by and large, I don’t experience the extreme levels of danger that are presented, so frequently, in Jeremy’s videos. That’s not so say it doesn’t happen, but not as often as his presentation suggests.

It didn’t take long for Jeremy to find himself at the heart of a senseless culture war that has grown up around cycling. It has become a weirdly political thing, bound up in so many ways with crazy peripheral stuff like 15 minute city conspiracy, ULEZ, anti net-zero thinking, “wokeness”, sexuality and class. It is appalling that his messaging became a lightening rod for endless abuse and ignorant vitriol; but that is exactly what happened. Each of his films, when uploaded, would be seized upon with glee by his armies of detractors, showering him in insults and threats. Sometimes, Jeremy ignored them (very hard to do), sometimes he tried to debate them (literally impossible) and other times he would enlist the help of his followers to go over the top of the trenches in what is referred to as an attempted “pile-on”, by quote tweeting certain crass or ignorant responses.

The noise generated around Jeremy’s feed therefore became toxic, unwelcoming, unattractive. Far from promoting cycling to a wider audience, I feel that it made cycling seem militant, deeply scorned by a loud majority of road users and pedestrians, unpopular, a little unhinged frankly. A neutral observer on the issue might be forgiven for wondering “what is this war?” and “who are these warriors with Go-Pros?” and “why on earth would I aspire to join them?” And all, I stress again, in the context of a expressing point-of-view that was right. Fundamentally, right.

I believe it is important to know the limitations of what one can achieve. I am 55, white, male and obviously, publicly heavily invested in cycling. When I write in columns or talk about my experience on the airwaves, I know that a certain section of the population are listening, but only a certain section.

The Universal Cyclist

The remainder, the vast majority of the population are absent from the debate, forming their world view elsewhere, blissfully unaware of either me or my stated aims. Just as I cannot help being the colour, class and age I am, I also acknowledge that I can only speak for me and people loosely like me, and that each part of society must find its own reflection.

If we are to effect societal change (and we are, it is happening, at least in our bigger cities and painfully slowly), the messaging must be much more subtle and nuanced. It must tailored to each social group, almost to each individual, to each circumstance and address different aspects of their lives; health, mental wellbeing, climate concerns, financial considerations etc. And here I am referring to driver behaviour as much as I am to encouraging cycling.

The biggest single (silent) tool at our disposal is modelling the behaviour of our peers and colleagues, our family and friends. The more frequently we come across people we know who are making, or have made, changes in their lives, the more we will be inclined to follow. I believe too that corporate power could potentially become a key lever, and has yet to be tapped into. Remember how during the Covid pandemic it was the proliferation of signage we encountered in supermarkets which informed us about social distancing more than anything else? That same quotidian experience could become transformative it, for example, Pret a Manger gave every staff member who wanted one a liveried bicycle to get to work on. Or if the NHS ran a similar scheme for its millions of staff.

Likewise, the more bikes there are on London’s streets, the more that driver behaviour will fall into line with the altered reality. Though I have little in common with the methods of the Critical Mass movement, I completely accept their ultimate premise. If you could see how heavily bike riders now outnumber car drivers on certain London routes at certain times of day, you will understand how the acceptance of their preeminence on the road automatically reduces the potential for aggression from motorists.

These are nuts and bolts of real change. Shouting at each other online isn’t. Let’s use fewer power tools, more soft power. At least, that’s what I think.

I hope this has been a constructive read. I can’t stress enough how much I admire Jeremy’s passion and sticking power, even if, as I outline, I have issues with his methods. But I pay respect to all campaigners who are fighting in their own way for a transformation in our built environment and in our lived lives.

Anyway, I just realised I made this London cycling video 6 years ago, and stuck it online. So I’m a whopping hypocrite. If you want to explore this subject more, I co-host a long-standing active travel podcast with the excellent Adam Tranter and Laura Laker, called Streets Ahead. Give it a listen.