Bus lanes were made for Lycra, not leather

Swapping his bike clips for a leather jacket, the Mayor is pushing ahead with his wheeze to let scooters and worse use bus lanes. He claims this is safe, following an experiment in that teeming metropolis Bristol, and two similar pilot schemes in Finchley and Brixton. The idea seems to be to encourage more drivers to switch to motorbikes.

There are two problems here. First, he's doing this on the basis of flimsy evidence - pilot schemes on just two London streets. Nationally, cyclists are three times more likely to killed in collisions with motorcyclists than with cars, and twice as likely to be seriously injured. Figures for these cyclist deaths in London aren't available but those for pedestrians are similar to the national picture - they're proportionately three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a motorcyclist than by a car. In 2004, that left 114 pedestrians dead or badly injured.

It's a statistic that will concentrate my mind as I power down the bus lane in Beaufort Street, Chelsea, on my way home tonight. This city has shamefully few dedicated cycle lanes; in their absence, the expansion of bus lanes has made a huge difference. For large parts of my route to work, bus lanes are the only relief from heavy traffic. Queenstown Road, in Battersea, doesn't look quite like Amsterdam yet but the thickets of bicycles there are proof of Londoners' growing willingness to get on two wheels.

And this is the second problem with Johnson's plan. He says he wants to quadruple the proportion of journeys made by cycle. Yet opening up the bus lanes to motorcycles will discourage cyclists and would-be cyclists, especially the timid ones. At the same time, increasing the number of high-speed routes for motorcycles will encourage more commuters to buy them, given petrol prices. It's going to make his cycling target pie in the sky.

I've got nothing against motorcyclists - in the saddle, I actually view them as more kindred spirits than I do thoughtless drivers or dozy pedestrians. But if you let them share the bus lanes, Boris - well, you'd better make sure you're wearing a helmet.