Stop! Police!!

Almost - there's more scope for poetic licence here - an e-mail to the local police. Been prodding them about this, intermittently, for a couple of years.

PC Dean

the Whorral Bank cycle track is a flawed piece of infrastructure. It fails against design standards in ways I shan't bore you by enumerating. Suffice to say that any Dutch or Danish transport engineer proposing it in its current form would be laughed back to the drawing board. Or sacked. Only two things in its favour: it's a rare, if not the sole, legally designated/protected stretch of cycling infrastructure in Morpeth, and – though this is doubtless more by accident than design – it doesn't bring cyclists into proximity to parked cars, doesn't funnel them within range of car doors being opened in their path. All cycle training urges cyclists to steer clear of this 'door zone', as its known. Being 'doored' is perhaps second only to the left turning lorry as cause of death and injury to cyclists.

So it's a disappointment that illegal encroachment on this space by Tommy's Field allotmenters, creating a door zone hazard for passing cyclists, persists. With the onset of good weather, this offending is pretty much a daily occurrence. I attach some recent photos.

The affable bloke who features in one of them, who looks like he might have been grown on an allotment himself, said police had authorised his driving on the cycle track provided he came to rest high enough on the verge to keep all wheels off the tarmac. I've heard this same defence from allotmenters before, but the Road Traffic Act 1988, Section 21, is unequivocal: driving and/or parking a motorised vehicle on a cycle track is an offence.

I get that this is low priority stuff. But against the 'triviality' of the offence we might weigh the 'triviality' of the policing needed to resolve it. It isn't covert or complicated. This isn't terrorism, insider dealing or peaceful and law-abiding environmental protest. No officer need spend years in deep cover posing as an allotment holder; feigning interest in crop rotation, double digging, mulch and brassica varieties; fathering children by unsuspecting female allotmenters; all the while feeding registration numbers to his handler over furtive meetings in The Joiners. No oily private detective need provide transcripts of allotmenters' hacked mobile phone conversations. It doesn't need an armed response unit to shoot out the tyres of the offending vehicles before dragging the perps, screaming, out across their bonnets through shattered windscreens (though if you are minded to go the Bodie and Doyle route please give me a heads up so I can cycle along to watch). In fact it's hard to envisage an easier collar.

Passionate about active and sustainable personal transport alternatives to the car in the places where we live, I fail to see how as a society we might progress from this ludicrous irrationality

  to this sane alternative

while we tolerate this routine abuse and misappropriation by scofflaw car users of the scant few facilities that do currently exist for cycling 

 Yours ever...