NOTHING divides the cycling community quite like special attention from Thames Valley Police. This month the police are having their annual clampdown on cyclists who don’t use lights when it’s dark. This has some cyclists moaning and others rejoicing.

If the police are going to spend time enforcing road regulations, say the moaners, then they should spend it on motor vehicles, which kill hundreds of people and seriously injure tens of thousands every year.

The police would be doing us a favour if they bothered to police 30mph roads, never mind the city’s 20mph zones. And there are still plenty of people using a mobile phones while driving. And what about the amazing 1 in 10 drivers who still drink-drive? There’s a strong case for the police getting their priorities right and not bothering with relatively harmless highway infractions by cyclists.

It is easy to forget to take your lights off in the morning, and batteries do go flat, so it’s a real conscious effort for cyclists to be lit at night, rather than something that’s automatically there as with a car. In most urban situations a driver can see a cyclist on a road as clearly as he can see a pedestrian crossing one, and we don’t make walkers wear lights!

On the other hand, it drives me crazy when cyclists behave like idiots. The other evening, I cycled from East to West Oxford. At successive sets of red lights, dark-clad students on unlit jalopies cruised on through. The law aside, lights make you more visible where street lamps are dim – they could even save your life. But what’s a 20-year-old with champagne on his mind going to say to a middle-aged do-gooder banging on about bike lights?

Those naughty students should know that every single time an officer sees them without lights at night, they’ll get nicked. And that every time a PCSO sees them jump a red light or cycle on the pavement, they’ll be caught. But the fact is, one-off clampdowns excepted, the police ignore cycle misbehaviour day-in-day-out.

I for one would welcome a situation in which cyclists knew that every time a police officer saw them breaking the law they’d get nicked. Or better still, to opt for a reduced fine if they attended a rigorous cycling awareness training session, equivalent to motorists being sent on a speed awareness programme.

This isn’t a dig at the police. They have a lot of serious crimes to deal with, on squeezed budgets and with limited officer numbers. In terms of the seriousness of crimes of the road, it is a completely rational decision to take motor vehicle infractions as seriously as they do, and to take them much more seriously than cyclists’ infractions.

The consequences of motorists drink driving or speeding are much more deleterious than cyclists riding on pavements or not using lights at night.

In fact, if you think about it, most cyclists’ infractions are little more than plain annoying. They aggravate the hell out of me, out of you maybe, definitely out of dyspeptic pedestrians and drivers who need someone to have a pop at. It’s annoying, but in perspective, very rarely dangerous.