Chris Boardman: riding a bike on UK roads feels too dangerous for me

Chris Boardman, the former world champion cyclist who won gold at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and several stages of the Tour de France, is avoiding riding on Britain’s roads because he feels they have become too dangerous.

“The roads are statistically safe, but it doesn’t look it and it doesn’t feel it. Now I try to do more of my riding off-road, which is sad,” he told the Guardian in an interview to mark his appointment as the first cycling and walking commissioner for Greater Manchester.

Boardman said he found road riding in parts of the UK “exhausting” and unpleasant. “False modesty aside, I’m about as competent as it gets and I am constantly doing risk assessments. I’m looking at parked cars, seeing which way wheels are turning, everything that’s going on around me. It’s just exhausting. Whereas if I ride on a track or a trail I don’t have to do that and it’s just more pleasant these days,” he said.

Boardman’s mother, Carol, was killed last year while riding her bike in Connah’s Quay, Deeside. For months afterwards, he stopped cycling and has only recently got back in the saddle.

The 49-year-old, from Hoylake on the Wirral, has been appointed by the mayor, Andy Burnham, to revolutionise greater Manchester’s streets. He wants to encourage at least 10% of people to cycle or walk rather than drive within 10 years. Less than 2% of the population in Greater Manchester regularly ride a bike.

Boardman wants to spend “billions” redesigning the region’s streets and is exploring the possibility of closing parts of Manchester city centre to motorised traffic – including, potentially, the main thoroughfare of Deansgate, which runs from the Castlefield canal district right down to the shopping area of Market Street.

Boardman, who is chair of a bike manufacturer bearing his name and also reports on cycling for ITV, dislikes the word cyclist. He prefers “person on a bike”, and says he will be focusing his efforts on encouraging drivers out of their cars.

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“I’m not interested in cyclists ... I’m interested in the people in the cars. Getting them to change, it’s got to be easy, appealing and safe, in that order,” he said, suggesting his success ought to be measured by some sort of “happiness index”. “You have to measure: is this a more pleasant place to be or not?”

He added: “If it’s not the easiest solution, they’re not going to do it. If it looks a bit intimidating, they are not going to do it. And that means space, and it means joined-up space. I’m only going to make a piece of cycling infrastructure if it’s joined up, otherwise it’s wasting everybody’s money.”

Manchester has several notorious bike lanes that suddenly deposit cyclists into heavy traffic, sometimes on the wrong side of the road, or into bus lanes.

Boardman said he fell out of love with riding his bike following his mother’s death last July. “She was riding her bike in north Wales, just on her way back home. It was at a junction and she was effectively crushed to death,” he said.

A 31-year-old man will soon go on trial charged with death by dangerous driving and perverting the course of justice, North Wales police said. A 31-year-old woman, believed to be the driver’s partner, has also been summonsed to appear at magistrates court on25 September on charges of perverting the course of justice.

Boardman has mixed feelings about the prosecution of the driver who hit her, saying: “I don’t want to ruin someone else’s life either. So what do you do with that? There again if you let it go, you’ve demonstrated that someone can kill someone else with a car and you can get away with it, which is historically, statistically, what seems to be happening.”

He said he stopped cycling for a while afterwards because he “just didn’t want the conflict”.

“I don’t want to see people behaving on a road in an aggressive way because, more than making me angry, it makes me depressed to see human beings treating each other that way. To see a human being treat someone who is vulnerable as an obstacle and give them no more thought than that. So I just avoid putting myself in that situation.”

Boardman watched closely the coverage of the conviction of Charlie Alliston, the London bike courier who caused the death of a pedestrian when cycling on a track bike with no brakes, describing it as “a proper lynch mob”.

He said the prosecution was right, but “all road crime needs to be treated as crime, which his was. You’re going after somebody for manslaughter, OK that’s fine, and we should treat injuries caused by people driving a car in the same way.”

He added: “There is inequality on the propensity to cause harm, and that’s what’s been lost in the past week when there has been a proper lynch mob in the press, focused on a story taken out of all proportion, like a killer shark.”

But Boardman suggested Alliston was foolish to ride a track bike with no brakes. “I periodically see people riding around on a track bike and I think: you’re joking, what the hell are you doing?’ For your own safety as much as anybody else.

I’ve raced on a fixed gear bike on the road, but it’s got a brake on it, for my own safety. It’s scary as hell to do it any other way, it’s scary as hell and I don’t understand why people do it. If I was a policeman I’d just take the bike away, for their own good, not the danger they cause to other people.”