According to a new study, cycling a lot can affect your fertility if you are a man. The latest study to suggest this is reported quite well here: Elite cyclists ‘risk infertility’.

The conclusions are sensible: “the average man cycling to work would be unlikely to suffer fertility problems because of their time in the saddle.” and “40 years ago cycling was much more common but there is no evidence men then were less fertile”. So there’s nothing to worry about, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. My first son was conceived with the aid of a lot of expensive medical help (IVF to be precise), the reason: poor sperm motility and morphology. My second son was conceived the regular way. The only difference between the two pregnancies was that I’d stopped cycling after the first sperm tests.

My anecdotal evidence has no scientific weight at all but I would suggest the following things may be true:

1. 40 years ago saddles were a lot different to now. Lightweight racing saddles give you little room for manoeuvre (men, you know what I mean). A poor posture can lead to numbness and discomfort that lasts most of the day as I have found myself. If this is happening to you then consider the other long-term effects that might also be happening. Sort out your posture.
2. A short ride over bad roads (e.g. central London) might inflict damage equivalent to many more miles over a triathlon course. I believe that a modest amount of inner-city commuting might be the equivalent of 186 miles a week of triathlon training.
3. If your fertility is borderline anyway then it might take relatively little additional damage to make it noticeably more difficult to conceive.

The conclusions of the BBC article are sensible but do consider the personal risks to you rather than the general statistical results.

Also: none of the studies I’ve seen have ever investigated the effects of stopping cycling. From my own experience this had a positive effect on my fertility, but that’s not science. Please could somebody do a follow-up and investigate this aspect too?

Annoying journalistic habit note

How come the study talks about training amounts above and below 186 miles? Isn’t this a rather arbitrary figure to use for the study?

Yes, but of course the study was from a more enlightened country that uses OSI units for measuring distance. 186 miles is 300 kikometres. So the study drew the perfectly acceptable conclusion that around 300 kilometres a week was an amount that might contribute to infertility.

Converting this to exactly 186 miles is ridiculous for two reasons:

1. The original figure is stated to one significant figure. The equivalent imperial distance would be, say, 200 miles a week.
2. I am relatively aged, and I remember being taught metric units at school. Why oh why do we have to assume that people only understand our grandparents’ units?

Come on, journalists of Britain, most of us are not geriatric or imbeciles.

The post talked about collisions between cyclists and pedestrians. I said

The cyclist will see a pedestrian many metres ahead and will calculate his own trajectory and the pedestrian’s to ensure there is no collision.

John correctly commented that pedestrians don’t have a “trajectory”. What they have is a “radius of occupation” – a theoretical circle around them that they could be anywhere in when the cyclist reaches them. The radius of the circle is a function of the pedestrian’s maximum velocity and the distance the cyclist has to travel before impinging on the pedestrian.

Here’s what I meant to say: the cyclist unconsciously calculates this “radius of occupation” and avoids it.

Of course, there are some parts of the circle that the pedestrian is unlikely to occupy. The sophisticated cyclist might try to calculate the probability distribution across the entire “radius of occupation” and choose to clip a part of the circle where the pedestrian is unlikely to end up. This sort of calcuation will be correct most of the time, but ultimately will result in a few collisions.

I think such collisions are the fault of the cyclist. My diatribe against pedestrians was intended to include only those collisions that the cyclist could not possibly avoid.

It all happened in slightly comical slow motion. The motorcyclist was approaching a red light at walking pace when the pedestrian stepped out from between two stationary vehicles and walked into the motorbike’s handlebars. Being such a large bike, it toppled over veeery veeery slowly and the large man fell off and rolled very slowly across the road until he and his bike were blocking both carriageways of Bishopsgate just outside Liverpool Street station.

OK, nobody was hurt. But I bet some damage was caused to the bike, at least to its paintwork. In an ideal world the pedestrian would have volunteered to pay for any such damage since she was clearly the cause of the damage. I don’t know whether she did or not. I have never seen a pedestrian do so.

If I’m making a point, it’s this – I’m not sure the law even allows for the pedestrian to be at fault in this sort of situation. The pavements of central London are overflowing with pedestrians on a weekday morning. They encroach onto the road and do all the other anti-social things I mentioned before. It is literally impossible to avoid them sometimes however careful a cyclist, motorcyclist or driver you are. And yet avoid them you must, apparently. If you don’t you end up with an annoying bill at best. Or as dead as this gentleman would have been if a bus had been coming up the other carriageway.

Wearing lycra
And so we come to the most contentious allegation of all, that of wearing Lycra.

People in other countries don’t wear Lycra to cycle to work. Dutch people just put on a pair of cycle clips and wobble off to their jobs with no fuss. Chinese and Indian workers cycle in their millions without a scrap of Lycra between them. We in the UK (and North Americans too, I believe) seem to think that cycling to work is an aggressive sporting activity that demands a superhero costume and comprehensive decontamination facilities afterwards. This is cock, actually.

Lycra seems to be a big issue for the cyclist-hater. Is there a correlation between unpopular behaviour and the wearing of cycling shorts? The rise in the numbers of people cycling has led many novices onto the roads, and as with everything the novice will tend to over-prepare. The n00b is also likely to unwittingly commit offences against both common sense and the rule of the road. So perhaps the all-the-gear-and-no-idea factor leads to a slight correlation between Lycra and accidental loutishness. But the worst-behaved cyclists are cycle couriers (IMHO, and sorry to any couriers reading) and they wouldn’t be seen dead in Lycra (not nearly grungy enough).

Most cyclists are men and the Lycra-wearers seem to be an even more male-dominated sub-group. Buns of steel or not, I personally don’t want a display of masculine gluteal achievement in my face of a morning. Far fewer women cyclists wear overt Lycra, perhaps (and I generalise wildly) due to greater self-awareness and more emphasis on the control of their body image. I think it would be wrong to restrict the wearing of Lycra to women below a certain Body Mass Index, so let’s not wear it at all, people.

I believe, without much solid evidence, that the euphonious epithet Lycra Lout is really to blame. Some Associated Press journalist came up with a pejorative tag to brand all their pro-motorist, pro-old-lady stories and it has stuck because it is catchy. Lycra is a perfectly innocent DuPont brand name*. Wearing it to cycle to work is dumb but not really a Bad Thing.

People who disparage Lycra: escape from the bondage of alliteration!

 * Yes, I know that division was sold to Koch in 2004. “Lycra has gone to Koch” would be a good slogan in my book.

Assaulting innocent pedestrians
We frequently read about how a poor pedestrian was mown down by a cyclist committing one of the offences described in parts 1 and 2. Or possibly he or she was just crossing the road minding their own business when a cyclist slammed into them at high speed.

I have had five collisions in five years of regular cycling and three of them have been with pedestrians. From my personal experience I can say that cyclist-pedestrian collisions are not uncommon. Here are a couple of points that are self-evident to a cyclist but perhaps less obvious to a non-cyclist, especially one predisposed to think badly of cyclists (more on that later):

1. A cyclist is just a person too. It’s all too easy to equate bikes with other vehicles in this situation, but mowing down a pedestrian with a car is much, much easier than doing it on a bike. If you don’t believe me, try it. You are one person colliding with another, and you have the disadvantage of being perched on top of an unstable support, so the collision is inevitably followed by a fall. My point is this: a cyclist will usually come off worst in a collision with a pedestrian. Cyclists know this and therefore try very hard not to let it happen. My evidence is two broken laptops, a damaged bike and several joints that hurt in cold, damp weather.
2. Pedestrians are blithly unaware of what is going on round them. They cross the road using their ears instead of their eyes. They cross the road using a sort of herd instinct: if somebody else starts to cross then everybody follows without themselves checking that it is safe to do so. Unless you are a cyclist you will doubt this. I can only say once again: try it yourself.

And this, I think, is the crux of it. Cyclists’ attention is fixed on a zone about 20-30 metres ahead of where they are. The cyclist will see a pedestrian many metres ahead and will calculate his own trajectory and the pedestrian’s to ensure there is no collision.

Pedestrians’ attention is fixed on their iPod or their mobile phone. Thus when a bike passes near a pedestrian it is a complete surprise to the pedestrian. He or she will not have noticed the bike until it is very close. Thus startled, the pedestrian looks for the cause of his fear. I did not notice the bicycle therefore it was out of control, he reasons. That stupid cyclist nearly hit me! Stupid cyclists.

Then he opens his Daily Mail and there is a story about hooligan cyclists ramming pedestrians and his reasoning is confirmed. How true! he writes to the Letters Editor. And so the newspaper prints more such stories. It never prints stories about pedestrians stepping out in front of cyclists without looking – why would it? That isn’t news.

I conclude that the charge of assaulting innocent pedestrians is largely false. I’m sure it happens sometimes – I once saw a YouTube video of some cycle couriers in a race across London. Several innocent pedestrians were harmed in the making of that film, which was completely deplorable. Such cases are a tiny minority of cyclist-pedestrian collisions.

I read a newspaper article (I think it was the Daily Mail in fact) where cyclist-pedestrian incident statistics were quoted in support of the hooligan cyclist viewpoint. In other words, the journalist simply assumed that all such collisions were the cyclists’ fault (or hoped his readers would be stupid enough to do so). There seems to be a school of thought that says pedestrians are automatically the injured party in any road incident. I think this needs to be challenged. Pedestrians are often the cause of incidents and should be made to take responsibility for their actions.

Including me when I am one of course.

Riding on pavements
This is a complete no-no in my book. I would ride on a pavement about as often as I would drive a car on one, i.e. never. However, it is not unknown for cyclists to do this. There is an article in this week’s Time Out by a cyclist attempting to justify doing this regularly on her particular commute. Silly woman.

Cyclists who do this invade a space that is reserved for another class of road user. And by doing so they undermine all cycling campaigns aimed at getting such a space for cyclists themselves. Drivers who park (sometimes legally) in cycle lanes, road work contractors who block cycle lanes unnecessarily, planners who think 10 yards of cycle lane is worth installing so they can add to their cycle lane mileage for PR purposes: all these idiots are given succour by cyclists who ride on pavements.

Fortunately there aren’t many of them. No, really. It’s just that the ones who do are very, very noticeable. But the verdict is guilty anyway.

So we cyclists are 0 for 2. Guilty on the first two charges. Can we recover? See parts 3 and 4.

The Evening Standard, the Daily Mail,  Jeremy Clarkson and Malcolm all hate cyclists. Their complaints are identical – cyclists are generally accused of

1. Ignoring red lights
2. Riding on pavements
3. Assaulting innocent pedestrians
4. Wearing lycra

Lets look at these charges one by one over the next few days.

Ignoring red lights
Guilty, although I don’t do this myself these days. If you want to understand why cyclists do this, get a bike yourself; it will become obvious quite quickly. Here are the reasons why some cyclists do this:

1. It’s really annoying having to brake. You lose all your momentum and you have to push off from a standing start, which is where most of the effort in cycling goes. This comes under the heading of a Really Bad Reason to go through red lights, but it is the real reason why many cyclists do it.
2. It’s actually dangerous to be part of a cavalry charge of vehicles when the lights go green. Your first few yards as you push off can be quite wobbly and most drivers won’t give you an inch. This is the reason why ASLs are painted on the road at traffic lights. I recommend cycling in the safest way possible, and therefore if it’s safer on a particular occasion to ignore the red light then I would do so.

Cars, vans, motorbikes and scooters often stop in the ASLs although it is a Fixed Penalty offence. I don’t know of any driver who has ever been given a ticket for this offence. Most motorbike and scooter riders actually think they are entitled to use the ASL legally. They are not.

It was when I realised that I was using all sorts of rationalisation to justify going through red lights, but the real reason was Reason 1 above, that I stopped doing it.

Tomorrow – riding on pavements.

Your journey to work might take you along perfectly paved pathways. You glide serenely along flat tarmac waving at friends and picking your nose. Lucky you. My journey is in central London, mostly that part of London governed by Tower Hamlets Council. Whatever they spend my council tax on, it certainly isn’t the backstreets and cycle paths of their assorted hamlets.

What I’m getting at is this: taking a hand off the handlebars of your bike is a recipe for disaster. When your front wheel hits a pothole it will go where it wants, and you will fall off and look a tit. Or you will fall off and get run over by a white van. More likely and more painful.

But you need to communicate with other road users sometimes. It’s impossible to flick the Vs at somebody when you have both hands on the handlebars, for instance. Unless you are deformed in some way.

This is where your RADA training comes in. If you make eye contact with your target audience you can communicate all sorts of messages without resorting to gesticulation. Let’s take changing lanes as an example. Conventional wisdom has it that you should gracefully extend an arm in the direction you want to go and manoeuvre across when convenient. In reality, if you try this you’ll just get your arm hit by a wing mirror. Then you’ll hit a pothole and the rest of you will get hit by the rest of the vehicle.

No, the answer is to look over the shoulder where you want to move. Fix the nearest driver with a stare that says “I believe you are in my lane, sir” and move across in a manner that brooks no argument. Safer for you and less inconvenient for him since he won’t have to extract your mangled bike from his bumper this way.

Oh dear, I’m sounding angry again. In fact I had several civilised and good-tempered conversations with drivers this morning entirely through the medium of nodding and smiling. I did hit a few potholes but I stayed on my bike, which is the important bit.

Things I quickly remembered:

1. Pedestrians are lethal. Stay away from them at all costs. They are deaf, dumb, blind, stupid, suicidal sheep. I know this because I am one and I am as guilty as anybody else of crossing the road with my ears rather than my eyes. Ladies and gentlemen: bikes don’t make a noise. Look before you step into the road.
2. Car doors should be banned. I was once cycling behind somebody who rode into a car door that somebody flung open in front of him. I will never forget (although I would like to) both the sound and sight of the impact and of body parts doing things they weren’t designed to do. Planners who mark cycle lanes next to parked cars should have their limbs snapped. Ignore the cycle lane and occupy road space like the vehicle you are.
3. Don’t be bullied. Drivers will shout, gesticulate and sound their horns if they think you are delaying their journey by a few seconds. Be a generous and thoughtful road user but never, never, never do that at the expense of your own safety. There is only one loser in a cycle accident whoever is at fault. Don’t give the bastards an even break.

Does that sound angry? I used to be an angry cyclist but I’m trying to be a lot calmer this time round. There are more bikes on the road than there used to be and I think drivers are a bit more used to them. I try to remember to acknowledge any good driving. So far it’s working. I am arriving out of breath and a bit warm but not nearly so cross as I used to.

And now I have a blog to vent my frustration with. Lucky you, reader, you can look forward to some Slightly Annoyed Cyclist anecdotes in the next few months.