Have you ever noticed how Jekyll and Hyde drivers are? In Dr Jekyll mode, drivers love to let you out of a side road with a magnanimous flash of the headlights (not realising that this irritates cyclists who have to brake suddenly, then start pedalling again from 0). And they’ll give a little wave, like royalty, when you stop for them to pass on a narrow road.

When they are nice, they are very, very nice, but – what shockers they are in Mr Hyde mode. I was cruising in my car at 20mph up Morrell Avenue. The driver behind us had spent the past few minutes driving way too close along Marston Road. He was itching to overtake. Soon, his moment arrived.

The road widened between parking bays, and he sped past. Suddenly, a bus appeared over the brow of the hill and he pulled in right in front of me. Cue harsh braking and incredulity that anyone would be so stupid as to speed like that on a narrow busy road, to gain the length of my car.

Cyclists are not blameless of course. They’ll undertake you at speed as you wait at a red light, almost sending you flying like a skittle. They’ll start off while lights are still on red – and it’s always the slowcoaches too. As I pass them 30 seconds later, it’s tempting to quip they’d have no need to jump the lights – and make ‘all cyclists’ scapegoats to Mr Hyde – if they brushed up their cycle fitness.

I am dismayed when I see cyclists breaking the law. In fact, I once tried to persuade both Thames Valley Police and the county council to adopt a “Bike Polite” programme for Oxford.

“Bike Polite” would educate cyclists with messages about not riding on pavements and so on, backed up by a media campaign and web resources. Under a “Bike Polite” scheme, officers would police cyclist misbehaviour hotspots and give miscreant cyclists a “Bike Polite” lecture or a leaflet, and a fine if necessary. Neither organisation took up the initiative, though it works well elsewhere: take a look at the website politecycling.info/edinburgh.

To put this into context, when I spoke to a senior officer in charge of road safety policing across the entire Thames Valley, he made it clear that their priority was to reduce the numbers of people killed and seriously injured (KSI) on the region’s roads.

Riding on pavements and jumping red lights he accepted are a bit of a nuisance, but given that more than 99 per cent of KSIs are caused by drivers not cyclists, they could not justify diverting any resources from policing drivers.

It is obvious why the police are reluctant to get involved with naughty cyclists. And even if they did, more than 10,000 motorists in the UK are still driving despite having 12 or more penalty points on their driving licences, by convincing courts they would suffer “exceptional hardship” if banned from driving. Could you claim you’d suffer “exceptional hardship” without your bike? I know I could.