Why are London cyclists so cutthroat? The number of bikes on the road here has tripled in the last decade, and that's the official estimate; personally, I'd bet on quadrupled. That means a high proportion of new converts. Witness white folks who go Islamic, like John Walker Lindh: converts are fanatics. Converts don't simply cycle; they are cyclists. With whole identities on the line, no wonder neophytes will churn to the point of stroke to overtake veterans like me — who just want to get where they're going in one piece.

Otherwise, the problem is primitive competition for a scarce resource: space. Which is my leading complaint about Boris Bikes — a high-profile and seemingly green scheme for the mayor, but one that, well, doesn't so much put the cart before the horse as put the buggy before the carriageway. Boris is adding 6,000 more bikes to roads that cannot handle the bikes already on them.

I am wholly sympathetic with London motorists who grow exasperated with massive packs of cyclists clumping at intersections and veering wide into second lanes in their frenzied determination to overtake one another. But the capital has yet to seriously commit to making life easier for cycling commuters, whose needs should have taken priority over those of the casual day-trippers and tourists likely to use Boris Bikes. (Their docks are deliberately located far from railway stations, lest they be overused. This is serious?) The addition of a small fleet of Barclays rental bikes will infinitesimally relieve pavements and mass transit, but the people who hop on city-centre rental bikes are not taxi riders or car owners. Commuters who cycle in droves from outer and southern London do significantly reduce motorised traffic and take pressure off public transport.

To be truly green, London has to be more radical, and I do not mean slapping around a little more blue paint, à la the new so-called cycling "superhighways" — since if that's a superhighway, the Cumbrian Way is the M25. Rather, I'd commend the kind of wide, separated bikeway that now traverses the whole west side of Manhattan (perhaps along the Embankment) and protected bike paths for which occasionally — shockers — motorists have to sacrifice. Boris Bikes are a pleasant but merely decorative addition to London transport. A real cyclist already has a bike. What a cyclist doesn't have in this town are safe routes on which to ride it.