What tragedy would it take to stop you running a red light?

I’ve spent many years cycling to work, I get it. We’re in a rush, we left it a little too late to get to work for the customary pat-dry-chemical-shower-get-dressed-get-breakfast etc. Maybe the kids were playing up, and no one wanted to put their shoes on. Maybe you wanted to beat that guy who’s been tailing you for the last few kilometres. I never ran red lights; the jeers from other cyclists scare me into submission. I also catastrophised more than a few times about being knocked over by a lorry and no one mourning me because it was all my fault.

Last week, during a bank holiday, at a well-marked crossing outside a school, at the entrance to a busy park, exactly that happened. Having been raised on “green means go!”, my two-year-old waited patiently for the green man, and then pushed off across the road on his scooter. A cyclist crashed into him. Cycling down a busy road, he did not stop for a red light — instead sailing straight through it and into my toddler, who was thankfully wearing a fluorescent yellow helmet.

My child hit his head and the cyclist came off his bike flexing his injured wrist. As I berated him, while holding my wailing child and gathering my eldest to cross the road safely, all he could say was, “I apologised, OK! It was an accident!”. It is not OK, nor is it an accident. He ran a red light, he caused an injury. An accident implies there was nothing he could have done to prevent it, but there was, and that’s obeying the road laws. Nothing he could have said would have appeased me, but the defensiveness was even more of an affront.

As he got back on his bike and cycled off and my toddler eventually calmed, a lady gave us a bottle of water and an ice cream she had run to the shop to buy. Another lady, standing with her children, sighed heavily and said, “Thank god your child was wearing his helmet.” For the cyclist’s part, he’s lucky I had children to look after.

Now, when I ruminate on the event — did I handle it correctly? What could I have done differently? Should I have called the police? Should I report it to the council? One lady took a picture of the offender; what could I have done with it? What condition would my child have been in if he hadn’t been wearing his helmet? What if he’d broken bones? I wonder if the cyclist has been reflecting on his actions.

Cycling is a lovely hobby, a great and eco way to get around the city, but many have long-lamented the various sub-groups of cyclists that give us all a bad name. The weekend half-cut Lime-bikers, the MAMILs riding four abreast on country lanes, the commuters running red lights, the delivery e-bikers riding pavements, and countless other stories from pedestrians about the 1.2 million daily cycle journeys in our city.

The reasons go deeper than mere impatience; delivery drivers are fighting algorithms that set tight deadlines and are distracted by phones that direct them to their next job. Payments per delivery make speed more important than safety. There is a human cost to our desire for food and groceries to be delivered into our waiting hands.

There’s also a lack of cycling know-how; with Lime, Forest and Voi now deployed in the majority of London boroughs, there are absolutely no restrictions as to who can ride them amid traffic in the busiest parts of the city. The popularity is so great that Labour used Lime bikes coming to Waltham Forest as a vote-earning pledge before last week’s local elections.

The conundrum is in plain sight; cycling is a brilliant and eco way to get around the city, especially with clogged roads and expensive public transport, and anyone can do it if they can buy a bike or download an app and pay for a ride; but they can also be a danger to pedestrians due to largely unenforceable rules being ignored. Two truths can be recognised at once — we need our city to be cycle-friendly for the masses of benefits it not only gives the riders, but also the environment; and that cyclists who ignore the road rules everyone else has to follow should face consequences that aren’t limited to a puce mother telling them off.

The solution is unclear. Do we need more TfL THINK! road safety ads that show the grave consequences, like they did with cars and motorbikes? Do we need more legislation around delivery services? Fixed penalty fines of £50 are only enforceable when traffic police are around, and the City of London certainly doesn’t have enough resources to man every red light.

But for the everyday riders, even if you don’t believe in self-preservation, if you’re convinced you’re invincible — can you say the same about the two-year-old you might crash in to?