“I would say only about 50 per cent of drivers in London are terrible,” says Jeremy Vine when I meet him near Oxford Circus. “The rest are quite good.”
We’re talking about cars because as well as being one of Britain’s most famous broadcasters, the keen cyclist is also known for his hobby — policing the roads with a camera mounted on his helmet. With his friend “CyclingMikey”, real name Mike van Erp, Vine is part of a wave of cyclists taking London road safety into their own hands.
While the rest of us shout a few profanities at bad drivers, Vine et al have taken to filming them, and sending evidence to the police. “We’ve got some phenomenally, record breakingly bad drivers in London,” Vine says cheerfully.
Vine posts his footage on social media, editing it himself to point out the worst offenders, often vans whizzing too close at high speed, or drivers using their phones at the wheel. Some get angry when they realise they’re being filmed.
The presenter had to go to court when one man “jumped out of a car and threatened to knock me out”. Arguments are common. Vine chuckles, remembering that a black cab driver tried to run him off the road after recognising him.
“I’ve been called a d***, w*****, tosser, c***, there’s a whole list, but it’s all in friendship,” he says. Vine reveals he always has an “escape route” during altercations, adding: “I never get angry, I just hear them out.” He’s now suing Joey Barton after the ex-footballer called him a “bike nonce” online.
He and his kind occasionally get into trouble themselves. Cyclist Dave Clifton, who reported a Range Rover driver for using his mobile phone at the wheel in Belgravia, was recently charged by police for himself riding without due care and attention — though the case was then dropped, and police said sorry to Clifton.
But threats of violence and police interference won’t stop the cyclists. Vine sent four videos in one day of bad drivers to the police, two for driving too close to him, and two for using their phones. “They will all be fined,” he says. Vine normally only sends in one out of around 200 infringements he sees each week. He, like many others, uses a portal on the Met’s website, which he praises for how easy it is to upload.
CyclingMikey, meanwhile, has reported more than 1,700 drivers since 2019 — around one a day — resulting in over 2,500 penalty points and £150,000 in fines. On the morning that I meet him on “Gandalf Corner” by Regent’s Park, which has been given the nickname in his honour (think “You Shall Not Pass”), he notices several drivers on their phones waiting at traffic lights, including a Porsche and Bentley, all of whom he will report to police. He has friendly chats with some, but all of the ten he catches that day are likely to get fines or points on their licences. Mikey says he thinks that female drivers are better than men – for every four men he reports, there’s only one woman.
Many are idling in traffic while looking at their phones — including, on at least one occasion, an off-duty ambulance — leading to claims they aren’t causing real danger. But Mikey has an answer for that, saying that there’s evidence to show looking at your phone in the car ruins concentration, and he often sees cars “rolling towards pedestrians”, even when they think they are stationary.
Mikey’s fame is clear. Soon after I arrive, one man slows down to shout his name from a 4x4 window. “I got hit by a car four years ago,” the driver says, as if he is about to give praise over road safety. Then he goes on, deadpan: “But you’re still a c***.” Another dapper older gentleman wags his finger at Mikey and gets his phone out to take a picture, saying he had shopped him to the police in the past. “I don’t remember him,” Mikey says. Van Erp has a Dutch background — saying Holland is much nicer to bikes than here — but grew up in Zimbabwe.
He’s ended up on a car bonnet before — that of theatre agent Paul Lyon-Maris, though Lyon-Maris was found not guilty in court, arguing Mikey jumped onto his vehicle. And in the days before we meet, one driver posts a video online boasting that they will run Mikey over if they see him. He’s been called “Britain’s most hated cyclist”, and last week he came top in an online poll of over 12,000 people who said he was the worst person in history, ahead of Hitler. He says that some of the anger is “terrifying”, but he is okay with it. “I’ve done a lot of extreme sports growing up in Africa. I have a slightly stubborn and stupid outlook on physical danger,” he says, matter-of-factly, pointing out that the attention means his message is getting across.
Both he and Vine are deadly serious about bike safety. “The biggest cause of violent death in London is motor vehicles,” says Vine, arguing that drivers don’t realise they have a “weapon”. In 2022, more than 1,000 people were seriously injured, while seven were killed. The worst offenders are 4x4 drivers, Vine says. “Because they’ve got so much kit around them, they think they’re safe and they can therefore drive as badly as they want.”
Bus drivers, he explains, also need to “sort themselves out”, too often breaking the 20mph speed limit, musing that he might get a speedometer soon.
Vine thinks he and his kind are making a difference, saying he’s noticed fewer people using their phones lately. He leaves his home in west London at 5.30am to cycle 7.5 miles to his morning job on Channel 5, before heading to the BBC at lunchtime, then back home. When he started cycling, he had an “agreeable” approach to cars but was “amazed at how much violent and dangerous driving there was”. “I just thought ‘Are all these drivers trying to kill me?’”
“I began to understand… that the safest thing you can wear is not a helmet, but a camera — the bigger the better.” When drivers see it, “their behaviour changes… they become more careful, they don’t want to argue, they want to stay clear of you”.
It’s a sentiment that 27-year-old Lauren O’Brien agrees with. She moved to London in 2018 and always disliked the Tube. When her partner got knocked off his bike by a taxi doing a U-turn, she decided to get a camera, and feels much safer cycling on the roads.
She believes that making online videos is changing the safety culture. “I feel like drivers are starting to catch on to the fact that we’ve got these cameras and they can’t get away with things as much anymore,” she says. All three are seen as obsessives, though Mikey argues that he’s much more measured than people think. “I don’t hate drivers, that would be madness,” he says. “Very occasionally, I hate the people... I do have a dislike for Lyon-Maris, simply because what he did was so intentional and so arrogant and angry” he says, before correcting himself. “I don’t hate him, I just think he's not a very good human being.”It’s hard going to court and watching people go to jail, Mikey says, but thinks that if he wasn’t comfortable with that, he shouldn’t be filming — and he’s has got some famous scalps for his efforts.
He earned film director Guy Ritchie a six-month driving ban in 2020 for texting at the wheel of his Range Rover and spotted ex-boxer Chris Eubank using his phone in an open-top car.
He also took footage of Frank Lampard holding his phone at the wheel, although the ex-footballer’s legal team successfully managed to argue it wasn’t clear he’d been using the mobile. Mikey isn’t attracted to fame. “I go through life not recognising these famous people,” he jokes. Controversial chef Thomas Straker was found guilty of making a call at the wheel after another cyclist filmed him last year.
Mikey doesn’t like to be called a “vigilante”, because he’s not taking the law into his own hands — only helping the police. “I’m doing the exact opposite of a vigilante because I get the evidence, and I leave it to the justice system to decide.” He goes on to explain that police cuts have meant that the force relies more on citizen reports, quoting figures of 20,000 fewer officers. He says that since Covid, there has also been a “massive drop in driver quality”, musing that “maybe because it was quiet and everyone was speeding around”. YouTube can be big business and Mikey has more than 100,000 subscribers. Some of his videos have had millions of views. So is he in it for the cash? No, he answers. He won’t tell me how much money he makes but says “I still have to have a real job”, working for a wealthy family, who have a disabled son.
Lots of the cash he spends on the technology, especially on computer storage for his hours of footage. He claims that he doesn’t even spend much of his time on his hobby, only catching people during his commute.
As superhero origins stories go, Mikey’s is particularly moving. As well as wanting to cross the road safely with his own children (he has two with an ex-wife, one in their teens), at the age of 19, his father was killed in Zimbabwe by a drunk driver. “I remember coming home and getting a garbled phone call from a shopkeeper who said ‘There’s been an accident’ and where it was,” he explains. “I rode out there on my motorbike.” He dismisses the idea that he’s traumatised, as the accident happened 30 years ago. “But I still have a faint memory of the pain. And I’d like to save someone else that pain if there’s a chance.”
All three want better cycling infrastructure in the capital, and Vine is hopeful about the future. “The exciting thing is I can feel it happening” he says. “I think that we’re at the front of something and London will change, and be a better city for everyone, including people who drive cars”. So they carry on, even if it means being called some rude names in the meantime.
