STEPHEN LEWIS talks to the cycling champion who quit because he says York is too anti-car.

JOE Watt is a mass of contradictions. He’s a lifelong Tory who once voted for the Lib Dems against John Major in a general election.

He’s a keen cyclist who defends our right to use cars. And he’s a self-confessed shy, retiring type who stood for election as a city councillor and has just exploded on to the front page of The Press thanks to very publicly chucking in his “cycling champion” role in protest at the Clifton Green cycle lane.

Fiasco is not too strong a word to use about the whole Clifton Green saga, he says.

The cost of the cycle lane at Water End has risen from £300,000 to more than £500,000. It has been blamed in some quarters for a burst water main which forced Water End to close for more than a day. And it has been widely condemned by motorists and readers of The Press.

Coun Watt, who represents Skelton, Rawcliffe and Clifton Without ward for the Tories, says the cycle path is typical of the way traffic bosses in York have “overdesigned” the city’s network of cycle lanes.

“If we carry on like that, York is going to be a disaster,” he said.

He is all in favour of more people using their bikes to get to work, Coun Watt insists. He has cycled to work most of his life, and when he moved to York in the 1990s deliberately bought a house in Skelton, within cycling distance of his work in Clifton Moor.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the planet is warming up,” he said.

“I get very worried when I see programmes about the ice caps melting. We do need to change our habits and we do need to use our cars less. I have a modest car and I cycle to work, but I know of a number of people who have 4x4s and in winter go out and start the engines for ten minutes to warm them up before going to work. I suggest they might need a smaller car and to find a more environmentally-friendly way to get to work.

“But there is a balance. When we need to use our car, we need to use it. Are you going to be stuck in York? No, you want to go to the Dales and the Moors.”

While he is all for more cycling, therefore, he thinks traffic engineers in York have got it wrong. And not just in giving too much priority to bikes over cars.

He wants to see more people cycling: but some of the narrow cycle lanes running alongside busy roads that have been created in York are actually quite dangerous, he believes. He has seen cars parked in the cycle lane at Bootham, so that cyclists have to pull out into the road to pass them.

“And I nearly had a nasty accident myself, at Clifton. The traffic was backed right up from the lights. I was going quite fast up the narrow cycle lane. Somebody had left a gap (in the traffic) so a car coming the other way could turn right. I was speeding up the inside. I had a high-visibility vest on, and he saw me, but even so I thought: ‘I’m going to hospital. It is going to hurt.’”

If York truly wants to be a cycling city, Coun Watt says, it has to go down the German or Dutch route, where there are completely separate car and cycle lanes.

He is also a big advocate of responsible cycle use. He hates it, he says, when cyclists ride on the pavements, or cycle in the dark without lights.

And while, as cycling champion, he took part in last June’s naked bike ride through the city, he admits he felt uneasy. He did it fully-dressed, he points out. “But I felt a right idiot.”

Most of the participants didn’t represent ordinary bike users, he says. They mainly fell into two camps, he believes: naturists, and the anti-car brigade. He didn’t feel much sympathy for either group.

In fact, he does not like it when people with strong views hijack causes and then claim to represent others.

He is strongly against proposals for a 20mph zone in streets off Fishergate, for example.

“It would cause more accidents because people get frustrated.”

The people pushing for such schemes don’t really represent the views of anyone but themselves, he believes.

“There comes a time when the vast silent majority need to make a stand and speak out.” He took his stand by resigning the cycling champion role. Okay, he admits, he had always intended to stand down after a year, anyway. But he saw the opportunity to make a point, and he seized it.

He plans to continue as a city councillor, however, and says he will stand again at the next election.

His 23-year career in the RAF as an engineering officer – he rose to the rank of Squadron Leader – left him with the conviction that you have to stand up for what you believe in.

“There is no point complaining about things: you have to do something about things,” he said.


Factfile on Joe Watt

Age: 58

Family: married, with two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren, plus “another on the way”

Born: in a working class tenement flat in Edinburgh

Father: sales rep selling ladies’ underwear

Career: Apprentice aircraft engineer with Westland; 23 years in the RAF as engineering officer, rising to Squadron Leader; now base manager at ITP in York, which repairs and maintains the engines of RAF Tucano aircraft used at RAF Linton-on-Ouse to train new pilots