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news
CyclingMikey, City of London Magistrates (credit - CyclingMikey Youtube)CyclingMikey named by Daily Mail as one of the “top villains of 2024” – alongside the Post Office, VAR, Oasis, Gregg Wallace… and Paddington Bear
We know, we know the window for publishing long, meandering reviews of 2024 shut days ago – but it seems someone forgot to tell the Daily Mail.
Because on Friday, the newspaper’s online counterpart decided to belatedly celebrate the New Year by compiling a list of the MailOnline’s “top 12 villains of 2024” – featuring none other than road safety campaigner and camera cyclist CyclingMikey.
Yes, that’s right. Nestled alongside the likes of the Post Office, Gregg Wallace, Oasis’ dynamic ticketing policy, Just Stop Oil, and Paddington Bear (hold on, what?) in the Mail’s list of nefarious figures and divisive topics was CyclingMikey – real name Mike van Erp – the camera cyclist who has reported thousands of motorists, including the occasional celebrity, for their rule-breaking driving and mobile phone use at the wheel.
(MailOnline’s “top 12 villains of 2024”)
A contentious figure on social media, where he uploads footage of road users committing traffic offences to his X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube channels, Mikey has long been established as regular fodder for anti-cycling articles in certain sections of the national press, which have branded Van Erp a “vigilante” for his prolific third-party reporting.
So, it’s no surprise that the MailOnline staffer tasked with piecing together the publication’s “12 top villains of 2024” described the cyclist and road safety campaigner as a “pedalling pest” and the “bane of London’s roads due to his holier than thou antics”.
But what particular Mikey moment caught the Mail’s eye this year? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, the incident that earned Van Erp’s spot on the paper’s villainous list for April was the rather bizarre post – covered on the road.cc live blog at the time – which showed Mikey himself committing a traffic offence by obliviously riding through a set of red lights.
In the clip, which saw Van Erp stopped at traffic lights on Eccleston Street in Westminster, one of the four lights visible soon turned green, apparently signalling the cyclist to advance and cross the junction.
However, with no traffic following, and the benefit of camera footage to look back on, he worked out the other three lights were red and the green light was in fact for traffic coming from another direction and had been twisted out of place.
Having realised the error of his ways, Mikey then took the bold step of uploading the footage to social media and even invited any trolls who wished to report the incident to the police, giving the time and date of the incident to assist any report.
“It’s my mistake, I hold my hands up, I’m at fault there,” Mikey said during the YouTube video. “I missed that the other two traffic lights were still red. I realised something was wrong when the scooter rider next to me revved his engine and then stopped, so he obviously almost got caught too, but he and the other scooter rider behind me didn’t follow through.
“That’s probably the best use of video cameras that I have over the years, that I can go back and look at when there’s been a point of conflict or something’s gone unexpectedly and I can find out what went wrong and change my own riding as a result.
“If the police prosecute me, so what? I’ll pay the fine, you’re not going to see me complaining.”
And how did the Mail’s 2024 reviewer react to Van Erp’s admirably principled red light confession?
“Appearing to minimise his crime, the pedalling pest claimed that the intersection in central London was ‘fairly quiet’ and claimed other motorists had also nearly fallen for the traffic light,” the writer said of the “shocking” video.
“The peddling vigilante [what’s he peddling? – Ed] later added that he thought a ‘drunk’ may have twisted the sign ‘to point down the wrong road’.”
Apparently that’s enough to have you listed alongside the Horizon-scandal-laden Post Office, Glasgow’s brilliantly hopeless Willy Wonka Experience, and a certain former Masterchef host as one of the UK’s villains of the year.
But then again, he was also surrounded by the member of the public who threw a milkshake at Nigel Farage, school dinners, Just Stop Oil campaigners, and – I still don’t get this – the apparently “polarising” Paddington Bear.
“Does this mean I’m one of the good guys?” Mikey posted on social media after reading the Mail’s review.
Of course, as noted above, this isn’t the first time that Mikey and other camera cyclists have been negatively characterised in the national press.
In October, after covering the rapid growth in third-party road safety reporting in a news article and in a BBC Breakfast segment, the BBC was criticised by cyclists for referring to both CyclingMikey and fellow safety campaigner Tim on Two Wheels as “vigilantes”, with Van Erp arguing that cyclists who submit footage to the police are, in fact, the “opposite of vigilantes”.
Following a number of complaints, including from Tim himself, who described the “vigilante” reference as “disappointing”, the broadcaster admitted to road.cc that the initial language used in their story was “inappropriate”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- hawkinspeter 14 min 31 sec ago
Typical - they just (Time)lord it over us
- wtjs 1 hour 11 min ago
If it's 'on the road' it's still going to be obvious it's a cyclecam
- mark1a 1 hour 11 min ago
The article is subtitled "the 10 bikes we're most excited for in 2025", I'm guessing that the normal everyday titanium bikes for normal riders are...
- Jogle 1 hour 18 min ago
Lovely bloke indeed. He didn't have his photo taken when he was found guilty of coercively controlling his ex-girlfriend though. https://www.edp24...
- hawkinspeter 1 hour 44 min ago
No - they're a more recent American import. We (UK) got them in 1876 and Europe waited until 1948 to get them (more specifically, in Stupinigi,...
- wtjs 2 hours 21 min ago
I've only ever snapped up Shimano components Subtle and subliminal 'pasta cranks' propaganda from HP!
- wtjs 2 hours 25 min ago
I wonder if Cheshire police officers are of the opinion that the driver is entitled to ram a cyclist off the road if he 'takes the lane' in those...
- David9694 5 hours 38 min ago
Driver warned to take his meds after 'spectacular crash'...
- S.E. 6 hours 7 min ago
But limiting high gear wouldn't really solve all the crashes in sprints, narrow roads, etc. Someone needs to do serious studies and statistics on...
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47 comments
His intentions are good, it's just the way he goes about it sometimes can be a problem. One fears he'll come a cropper one day when says something to the wrong person......
Didn't he already do so when a very important man already breaking the law drove his car into him, then won in court?
The Mail demonstrating its utter irrelevance. Claiming that someone making the roads safer for everyone is a villain is perverse, warped and just wrong: some of the DM's most time-honoured and prominent characteristics.
Given that their readers are likely to be wealthy and such people are more likely to use their phone whilst driving, they're just looking after their supporters.
Anyway, the list is clearly wrong: no Feathers McGraw.
Tbf to them they didnt say that was the reason he made their list.
It was because he is a road safety campaigner but in April he published a video of himself jumping a red light and in their words tried to minimise the lawbreaking aspects to it.
For sure a disingenuous reason to make the list. But there's plenty of that going around thesedays, just like click bait headlines
And Feathers McGraw is a fictional character made of plasticine fwiw.
Given paddington was in the list, why not other similar types?
You mean that other ... bugbear, migrants from eg. the middle east getting here via poorer parts of Europe, like Wojtek?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)
I deal for the Wail, then !
Strange how fascism is getting so normalised these days. Most are chasing big Oil money.
The usually tamer Mail could claim to be 'just reporting it' yet I think they should stick to salivating over underage girls.
One should always stop on a red if there's crossing traffic or pedestrians who look like they may of use to society in the future. Otherwise why would one🤔😁
I remember this time at a crossroad, I checked that no cars were coming, no pedestrians to be seen, so I started pedaling through the red, only to be struck by a thundering voice behind my back, "Red light!".
That was a police car just behind be, shouting with their megaphone...
Lucky for all of us it was a police car and not a Daily Mail reader with a dashcam, because that's the sort of thing that - coupled with the right headline - will generate a lot of ad revenue for the Mail and a more aggravation for law-abiding people on bikes.
In much the same way GoPro (other brands available) footage of someone driving an SUV doing it would send the road.cc comments section into a frenzy of "throw away the key".
I'm sure you weren't putting yourself or anyone else in any danger, but the optics aren't great ...
If you didn't spot a police car behind you then I think your situational awareness needs more work. As you didn't overtake them (which would have certainly made you aware of them), you should have been aware of a vehicle approaching your rear as it's handy to know what way they're indicating so you can be wary of a left hook etc.
You're lucky it wasn't this instead, though
Right whingers will always go for hyberbole, truth twisting, double standards and fauxtrage. Sometimes seen in this parish.
If the Daily Hate dislikes Cycling Mikey, he can take that as a positive.
Thinking about Mikey and other cyclists who upload their incident footage it seems that the issue is people assume they're 'content creators' who ride around trying to find crimes to monitise. However dashcam footage uploaders don't face the same assumptions around them. I wonder if viewers pick up on cues such as aspect ratio and fisheye that tell them this is GoProesque footage from a content creator, versus dashcam footage with a date and timestamp from an 'ordinary' person.
Perhaps Mikey could edit the footage to make it more dashcammy (dashmaxxing?)
There is no possibility that video from CM and other cycling cammers can be 'edited' to make it look as if it has been taken by a respectable driver - even apart from the rather reasonable view that severely edited video is unlikely to be accepted as evidence
oh you've misunderstood, i don't mean trying to trick people into thinking they're watching a car and i definitely don't mean footage submitted to the police. i just mean adding a timestamp and perhaps cropping it slightly before posting it on sm
If it's 'on the road' it's still going to be obvious it's a cyclecam
"Filthy lycra weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!"
"Splendid fellows, brave heroes, risking their no-claims bonus for Blighty!"
Are there any dashcammer channels ? And not the compilation ones I mean equivalent to Mikey or Vine in terms of content and as a personal channel.
I presume there must be, just never bothered looking for any.
For me there's never an issue in having to hunt for incidents, any standard length bike ride will have multiple reportable incidents recorded on camera. Which is why I'm always perplexed when lots of the content the bike cammers produce are not the style of things I'd have bothered even noting during a ride.
That's when it feels like content for content sake and about feeding the monetisation algorithms.
There's the The London Dash Cam - he has it in for cyclists.
Part of the reason for posting stuff you see as ordinary is to highlight the problems that cyclists face, as there are plenty of people who think drivers are very law abiding and cyclists are not. Bear in mind what may be water off a duck's back to an experienced cyclist is very off putting to a casual one.
I can only hope for a cumulative effect on drivers in the long term to change their behaviours.
Karma would be for the editor of the DM to be hit by a vehicle whilst they are crossing the road, and the driver found to have been using their phone at the time.
More karma points if he was reading the DM on his phone.
I wouldn't imagine that anyone working there actually reads their own "newspaper". They all understand that it's best use is as backup toilet paper...
What a load of upside down blx really. The person who witnesses and reports a crime is a 'villian' and the person who commits the crime and is filmed doing so is a victim. Only in the unspeak of the media is such blx possible. I doubt a regular Mail reader would understand the paradox going on there.
Whether you are the villain or the victim also depends on your wealth and/or 'type'* in the world of the Mail, I suspect...
*Yes, that is a euphemism.
Until drivers stop seeing phone use whilst driving, speeding, etc., as 'victimless crimes', I doubt that this attitude will change, unfortunately.
Maybe one of the drivers he's caught texting whilst driving, and reported, earning them 6 points and a fine, was some high-up at DM.
Maybe we should crowd fund somebody to dig up some real dirt on the owners of the Mail...
You mean the 4th Viscount Rothermere? I don't know that there's too much dirt on him, but there's an interesting family history around the 1930s and 40s...
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