What’s driving Cycling Mikey, Britain’s most hated cyclist?

“I knew you were using your phone,” Van Erp tells him sternly. “I saw you looking down the whole way along there.” The NHS worker makes no pretence at having been taking an emergency call. “I do apologise,” he says. “Anything to say to your boss?” Van Erp demands. “I shouldn’t have done it,” the driver says meekly. “I was just showing my colleague something. It was wrong.”

“Can’t do it, man, especially being the trained driver you are,” Van Erp says. He motions him on his way. “Carry on then.”

“I’ll be reporting him,” Van Erp tells me afterwards. Is there anyone he doesn’t report? “I will occasionally let people off if the evidence is on the margin of what I consider prosecutable. Maybe slightly more likely to let them off if they’re polite.”

“Cycling Mikey” divides opinion in a way that’s stark even by social media’s standards. To some he’s a fearless campaigner, posting videos to YouTube that make Britain’s roads safer and inspire dozens of other camera-wielding cyclists in cities across the country to bring dangerous drivers to justice. To others he’s a self-righteous snooper (they were in a traffic jam!) and the most hated cyclist in Britain.

Like an avenging angel with a GoPro, Van Erp has caught more than 1,400 drivers since he began counting four years ago, and many more before that. He claims credit for the issuing of 1,800 penalty points to drivers and nearly £110,000 in fines. On YouTube he has nearly 100,000 followers.

His video of Guy Ritchie at the wheel of his Range Rover while texting in 2020 led to the film director being banned from driving for six months. He already had nine speeding points. “Hello, my friend,” Ritchie said amiably, lowering his window, probably unaware of Van Erp’s intentions. Van Erp caught Chris Eubank, a former world champion boxer, on the phone in 2021. He was less polite: “Go away Off you go, off you go.” He was given three penalty points and fined £280 in costs, not for phone use but for jumping a red light in his Rolls-Royce convertible after driving away from Van Erp.

He also caught Frank Lampard, the former England footballer, with a phone at the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon in London in 2021. Lampard, who kept his window shut and did his best to ignore Van Erp, was charged but the case was dropped when his legal defence successfully argued that Van Erp’s evidence failed to prove the phone Lampard was holding was switched on or being used for interactive communication. Van Erp said with hindsight he should have stayed by the passenger window to gather more evidence, rather than moving to the driver’s side to get a better shot, by which time Lampard had moved off.

Within 20 minutes of nabbing the ambulance driver I watch Van Erp catch three more phone users. There’s a woman in a Mercedes who quickly winds up her window after realising she’s being filmed. Another woman in a convertible Mini accelerates away, startled by the man in ghoulish black rain gear who appears, dripping, at her window. “West Carriage Drive is known as a chum line because there’s lots of drivers on the phone here, and it’s really easy to catch them,” Van Erp explains. “It’s like throwing fish guts and blood and fish oil in the water to attract the sharks. Entertainingly, people some years ago told me I should play the Jaws theme tune on my videos as I approach.”

His final victim is the driver of a steel lorry. Like the ambulance driver — and indeed all the drivers I witness — he doesn’t lose his rag. He’s polite, beseeching, holding up his phone to show the call is finished.

“No, don’t show me you’re only making it worse if you hold the phone,” Van Erp scolds. “You’re giving me more evidence.”

“If I was driving, I would have not done that,” the driver says. “I swear to God.”

“It’s still dangerous,” Van Erp says. “I appreciate your really good manners. It tells me you’re a decent person.”

“Yeah, because I already got six points on my licence,” the driver says in a last-ditch appeal for clemency.

The law was tightened last year so that it’s now an offence for a driver just to be touching a handheld phone that’s switched on — even if their vehicle is stationary in a queue of traffic with the engine turned off. The penalty is up to six points and a £200 fine. A total of twelve points on a licence can mean disqualification for six months or more. Is Van Erp happy with the fact that the driver is likely to lose his licence and therefore his livelihood? “I know, it’s a tough thing, especially if I have to face him in court,” he says. “Although it’s painful, I still think that I’m doing the right thing.”

“All I’ll offer is I’ll think about it,” is how Van Erp leaves it with the driver. (He does end up reporting him. “He already had six points, so he’s not learning from the lessons,” Van Erp tells me. “I felt his pain but nice people still end up killing and seriously injuring others.”)

For Van Erp, the change in the law last year led to a bonanza. As well as posting footage to his YouTube site, he uploads it to a police website, set up for citizen reporting. Staff at the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s biggest force, sift through it for evidence to issue fines. In the four years between 2018 and 2022 the average yearly number of reports sent to the Met was 4,750. The latest annual figure is set to reach more than 8,600 by October, having passed nearly 6,500 in June. Police say at least a third of the reports met the evidential threshold for fines or prosecutions. For comparison, the number of tickets issued by the Met’s traffic officers for phone use in the first half of this year was 3,476.

Spying on drivers trapped in gridlock may seem intrusive and mean-spirited to some, but Van Erp insists he and others like him are merely upholding the law and making our roads safer. But does the world need another self-appointed crime-stopper when roads are already crowded with cameras to enforce bus lanes, yellow box junctions, traffic lights, congestion zones, speed limits and, most recently, emission zones, as well as to trap drivers without insurance or road tax? Hasn’t Van Erp, and the justice system, got anything better to do?

For Van Erp it’s personal. A Dutch national, he grew up in Zimbabwe, where his father was killed, aged 59, while riding his motorbike by a drunk driver . Van Erp was 19. He learnt about the crash from a local shopkeeper, who phoned him with the news. He arrived in the Harare suburb where the family lived to find the wreck of the motorbike and his father’s body covered by a blanket.

“It was his birthday and in the morning I’d begged him to come gliding with me,” Van Erp says. “I had a pretty awesome upbringing and was close to my dad. He taught me to ride a bike, to fix punctures, to ride a motorcycle and to drive a car.”

It’s this memory, he says, that gives him the determination to plough on with the administration involved in reporting drivers, including the sometimes stressful business of appearing as a prosecution witness.

Van Erp, who speaks softly with a southern African accent, worked as an article clerk for the accountancy firm Deloitte & Touche in Harare before moving to London 25 years ago, aged 26. For a while he was an IT consultant and taught rollerskating. He now works for a wealthy family and looks after the family’s disabled teenage son, who has Down’s Syndrome. He also gets money from advertising on his YouTube channel, but won’t reveal how much. He is fortunate, he says, that the family is understanding of his Cycling Mikey alter ego and allows him time off to attend court. In his spare time he plays computer games and, by his own admission, is “nerdy”. He is divorced from the mother of his two sons, aged 14 and 21.

“Mikey is not mad, not obsessed, not a vigilante,” one ardent fan says. “He simply believes rules are there to be followed. The police can’t police everything, so people like Mikey fill in the gaps.” That ardent fan is Jeremy Vine, the BBC and Channel 5 presenter — and cyclist — who often bumps into Van Erp around London. He is, Vine says, an “inspiration, genuinely”.

Vine, 58, took up cycling to work at the BBC’s central London radio studios to get fit. Now he too is a helmet-cam warrior. A video he posted on Facebook in 2016 of a driver hooting at him and abusing him was viewed more than 15 million times and resulted in the driver being jailed for nine months for threatening behaviour.

Since then Vine has taken the concept to a new level. His videos are mini documentaries, complete with music, graphics and slo-mo action replays of close shaves with cars and vans. Recent clips reveal drivers swerving dangerously in front of him and pulling out of side turnings, nearly causing him to crash. A pedestrian can be heard shouting, “Vine, you prick.”

Vine now helps to edit and distribute Van Erp’s footage, and one co-production last month went viral. A furious Fiat driver, who claimed he had cancer and was on his way to hospital, showers Van Erp with invective, accusing him — in unpublishable terms — of never having had sex and inviting him to come over to the car and pleasure him. He tells him he’s so contemptible he must be a Chelsea fan.

“Mikey’s a brave guy,” Vine says. “He sent me the video and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ I said, ‘This is unbelievable.’ So I said, ‘Let me caption it for you because it’s just gold.’ Van Erp put the video on YouTube, Vine on his Twitter feed. “The last time I looked it had 18 million views, so it’s the most viewed thing I’ve ever put out. And it’s not even mine. It’s infuriating!”

Vine has uploaded “between 40 or 50” of his own clips to the Metropolitan Police’s website. “What I realised with the Met is they need something very specific and the most likely prosecution comes from mobile phone use. If a driver passes me at 50mph, they’re going to find it very hard to prosecute as I haven’t got a speedometer. So there’s all kinds of things they can’t do, but mobile phones they will do.”

He acknowledges that cyclists have had changes in their favour, such as improved road layouts, cycle lanes and superhighways and revisions to the Highway Code obliging drivers to give them more road space when overtaking. It’s still not enough, Vine says.

Department for Transport figures for 2020 show that 17 people were killed and 114 people were seriously injured in road traffic accidents across Great Britain where the driver was using a mobile phone. (In the same year there were an estimated 6,480 casualties owing to drink-driving, with between 200 and 240 of these being fatal.)

In London, could the efforts of Van Erp, Vine and others be having an effect? Since 2018, of the 495 fatal collisions in the Metropolitan Police area, six were categorised as cases where a “driver using a mobile phone” was a contributing factor. Last year there were none.

Law changes are likely to have played a part too. After the penalty for using a handheld mobile phone at the wheel doubled in March 2017 to six points and a £200 fine, the number of drivers issued with fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for using a mobile phone at the wheel dropped by more than 40 per cent, according to the AA.

“It’s bizarre,” Vine says. “In the past two weeks I haven’t seen anyone on a mobile phone and I’m starting to think drivers have realised that they’re being filmed by cyclists as well as by road cameras.”

“My goal is to give people the perception they might be caught,” Van Erp says. “It’s the certainty of detection that’s the best deterrent.” He welcomes the fact that other cyclists have taken up the cause, and admits he has already been overtaken by copycats, some younger and more eager. “I don’t think I’m even in the top ten of London reporters of road crime any more,” he says.

Superintendent Daniel Card, who heads roads policing for the Metropolitan Police, seems grateful. “We don’t dissuade people from reporting crime,” he says. “That’s why we have the portal. But there are no prizes from our point of view as to who can submit the most.”

Most of Van Erp’s online viewers aren’t there for the traffic justice, they’re watching for the drivers’ reactions. Some, like Guy Ritchie and all the drivers I saw being caught, are sheepish and polite. Others, like the highly offensive but amusing non-Chelsea fan, are not.

“I’ve had two people try to stop me by grabbing my bike,” Van Erp says. “Then there was a taxi driver who tried to take my camera from me and failed, and a very large man who tried with much more violence. He’s awaiting trial in the crown court for assault.” Given this, and his devotion to road safety, it will seem strange to many than Van Erp doesn’t wear a helmet when out cycling. They “most likely don’t save lives” is his justification.

Paul Lyon-Maris, a theatre agent who has represented Sir Ian McKellen, was cleared last year of dangerous driving and common assault after he was accused of bulldozing Van Erp, who was on foot, and carrying him for 60 feet on the bonnet of his Range Rover. Footage showed Van Erp shouting, “Why are you driving into me?” as he attempted to block Lyon-Maris from making an illegal right turn near Regent’s Park. Lyon-Maris yelled back: “I’ve got an appointment at half-past eight. Get out of the way!” Following a short argument, Van Erp is heard saying, “Hey Siri, call 999,” before police officers arrived.

Nick Freeman says cases like this are a good example of camera cyclists becoming a danger — not least to themselves. Freeman is the lawyer also known as Mr Loophole, who specialises in defending celebrities in traffic and speeding cases. It was he who got Frank Lampard’s case dropped.

Freeman believes the police are “actively encouraging” their behaviour, arguing the outcome will lead to mistrust and drivers showing less consideration. “Using a mobile phone in a car is dangerous and it is right that it’s prohibited. But I don’t think we want to live in a snitch society. I’m not saying the public don’t have a role to play but, really, isn’t that the role of the police?

“It’s an industry now and in my view it’s wrong. And there’s no relevant legislation that properly deals with cyclists who cycle dangerously. So the law is all over the place.”

Freeman points out that fixed traffic cameras can already spot drivers who aren’t paying attention. As long ago as 2006, the same year Van Erp started patrolling London’s streets, the motorist Donna Marie Maddock, 22, was fined £200 and given six penalty points after being caught by a police camera in north Wales taking both hands off the wheel to apply make-up. Devon and Cornwall police this year began trialling a new camera system called Acusensus that checks if drivers are on handheld phones. “The police could say to cyclists, thank you very much for your help but we no longer need it. Please don’t do it.”

Van Erp disagrees. With a dwindling number of traffic police to enforce road laws, camera cyclists are the best hope of deterring drivers, he says. In most cases, to secure a conviction, courts need video evidence from close up and a low angle to prove a phone was actually switched on. This may explain why an increasing number of drivers are using privacy glass in the front windows of their vehicles. Stick-on tinted film can be bought online for less than £10. It’s illegal if it shuts out light by more than 30 per cent but if stopped by police offenders are often just told to peel it off.

Freeman claims there is evidence that hands-free devices, which can legally be used to make and receive calls while driving, are just as distracting to drivers as handheld ones. There is also growing evidence that dashboard touchscreens, as installed in most new cars, can pose the same risk as phones.

Van Erp sometimes shows a slide at the start of his videos to show how the effect on driver reaction time of using a mobile phone at the wheel is comparable to that of drunk-driving. But should it really require a middle-aged vigilante on an ebike to enforce the law? “I’m not a vigilante. I’m giving my evidence to the police. It’s the exact opposite. I’m showing trust in the justice system. As for why I do it, well, that’s what every good citizen does. If someone’s being burgled or someone is smashing up a car, you do your bit and give your evidence.”

Yet he could surely just report drivers to the police without appearing to court publicity by posting videos on social media? Wouldn’t justice in the relative privacy of the courtroom be better than public shaming? “Last year I reported the most I’ve ever done, which is 383 drivers, and that’s not very many. But on social media I can educate millions more.

“What does surprise me is quite how very angry many people get over something that’s really just a traffic offence. They’re not going to jail. Maybe a taxi driver will lose their green badge. But they are professional drivers. They should know very well that they should never touch their phone, and yet many of them still do.

“People sometimes accuse me of wanting power and authority and this is the only way I could get it in my sad life. But I don’t need any power or authority over anyone to do this.”