I’VE started to wonder if I might not be a member of that anti-car brigade you hear so much about. On the face of it, there are several factors against this being the case.

For a start I drive a car, a valiant Volvo with 130,000 miles on the clock. I like cars and if I ever have any money, I plan to buy a new one. I even sneakily enjoy Top Gear, hardly the sort of programme watched by the anti-car contingent. And I don’t agree with 20mph limits being imposed all over the place.

Yet I do ride a bicycle through York and see what the roads look like from the relative precariousness of two wheels. The antipathy towards cyclists surprises me, as cyclists are often a decent bunch; and when they aren’t, they do not offend in higher proportion than any other section of the community.

Some cyclists are cyclists’ cyclists; some of us just ride our bikes. For me this entails riding to work and back every day, occasionally heading out into the countryside for a pint in the summer (one of life’s great little pleasures), and failing once a year to get up the hills in the Yorkshire Dales.

That makes me someone who rides a bike, but not a cyclist in the clip-on-shoes, head-down, streamlined-clothes sense: just a man on a bicycle. And sometimes I am just a man in a car. Same man; different means of propulsion.

A cyclist who drives or a driver who cycles is more likely to have fuller appreciation of the situation. This hardly surprising observation leads to my modest proposal: everyone should have a go at being someone else sometimes.

So the driver of the Audi who pulled out in front of me the other night, causing an unaccustomed bout of shouting, should have to sit on my bike while I have a go in her car, waiting until the last moment and then screeching out as she rides along the main road on my bike. It might teach her something, and it would show me what a modern car is like to drive.

The same swap could apply to the Volvo driver who swerved before me in the pouring rain on a roundabout when I had right of way. And there was me thinking Volvo drivers were nice sorts.

No one is perfect, so I could do a role-swap with the cyclist who came down the hill from the university at full pelt in the rain at night just as I was preparing to turn right in my car. Mind you, if I had been him, I would have had lights on my bike and a fluorescent jacket on my back.

This game could be played many ways. Taxi drivers could exchange places with ordinary drivers. These ordinary drivers could wait until the taxi drivers were motoring along and do a U-turn right in front of them, just so they could see how alarming this can be.

As for drivers of certain white vans, they could be tied to posts at the edge of the road. Then the cyclists now driving their vans could whiz by really close so they knew what it felt like.

Joking aside – or half-joking aside – all this amounts to is a plea for tolerance. If we all took a bit more notice of each other, perhaps life would be safer. As for the anti-car brigade, well I am not a member of that association – which in truth seems to be a little like the “liberal establishment”, another of those scathing labels people throw about in a generalised, scowling Daily-Mail sort of a way.

Yet it is not anti-car to suggest that cars cannot be driven anywhere at any time; it is sensible and for the common good. Sometimes the common good is annoying, especially if it stops you doing what you’d like to do. Witness the partial closure of Lendal Bridge: this has irritated far more people than it has pleased, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad idea, even if it was poorly executed.

Well, that’s how it all seems to this cyclist, driver and pedestrian (multi-talented, you see).