Narrow Roads, Wider Consequences and Conflicting Expectations

Every summer, the same pressures return to narrow coastal roads across Southern Europe. Roads that remain calm and manageable throughout the winter suddenly carry tourists, cyclists, delivery vans, buses, motorcycles and heavy goods vehicles, all competing for space that has not changed, even though demand has. What changes is not the road itself, but the expectations placed upon it.

For local residents, the contrast is immediate. During the quieter months, these roads form part of the ordinary rhythm of daily life. In summer, they become shared spaces with competing functions. For some, they offer scenic routes for leisure and sport. For others, they are essential transport corridors connecting homes, businesses, emergency services and commercial deliveries. The conflict arises not because any one group lacks a legitimate reason to use the road, but because the infrastructure itself was never designed to accommodate all these demands simultaneously.

The legal question is therefore not whether cyclists may use these roads. In principle, they may. Nor is the debate about the environmental, health or social benefits of cycling. Those are well recognised. The more difficult legal question is how that right should be exercised where the physical limitations of the road make conflict foreseeable and where other road users depend on the same infrastructure for their livelihoods, daily lives, and, occasionally, their safety. It is a question that concerns cyclists most directly of all. Whatever the legal position, it is the rider, and not the bus or the articulated lorry, who bears the physical consequences when the answer turns out to be wrong.

Yet before the legal analysis even begins, something else happens. The language changes.

One newspaper reports that cyclists are blocking traffic. Another describes precisely the same situation, in which motorists are expected to share the road. Road safety organisations speak of vulnerable road users, while freight operators refer to critical transport infrastructure. Lawyers discuss proportionality, traffic management and public safety. None of these descriptions is entirely inaccurate, but each frames the debate differently. The discussion gradually shifts away from legal responsibility and observable conduct towards competing perceptions of fairness, entitlement and respect. Once that happens, constructive dialogue becomes considerably more difficult.

Regular readers of The Legal Professional will recognise a recurring theme. Whether discussing legal terminology, cross-border communication or professional language, the same pattern repeatedly emerges: language is never neutral. The words chosen to describe a situation influence how facts are perceived long before anyone asks what the law actually requires.

Across many European jurisdictions, broad underlying principles are similar, even though the detailed rules—and their interpretation—differ considerably. Cyclists are entitled to use public roads other than those from which they are expressly excluded, such as motorways and certain expressways, but that entitlement is not unconditional. Traffic law generally requires every road user to exercise reasonable care, adapt to prevailing road conditions, and avoid creating unnecessary hazards or unreasonable obstructions for others. Rights of access therefore exist alongside corresponding duties of consideration, a point that public debate tends to concede far less readily than the rights themselves.

That balance becomes particularly challenging on narrow coastal roads. They were often built decades before recreational cycling reached its present scale and before today's volume of tourism, buses and commercial traffic existed. Expecting infrastructure designed for a different era to absorb modern traffic without conflict is neither realistic nor sustainable.

Common sense should therefore complement legal rights. It is not, in this context, a vague appeal to good manners, but the recognition that a hazard which can be seen is a hazard which can be foreseen.

Much of the frustration expressed by residents and professional drivers does not stem simply from the presence of bicycles. It arises from behaviour that is perceived as inconsiderate. Riders travelling two abreast on roads where overtaking is already difficult, continuing conversations while long queues develop behind them, or repeatedly filtering to the front of traffic at signal-controlled junctions only to accelerate more slowly when the lights change may, depending on the circumstances and national legislation, be acting lawfully. Yet such behaviour often creates avoidable congestion and increases frustration among other road users. The legal question is not merely whether a particular manoeuvre is technically permissible. Depending on the jurisdiction and the circumstances, the relevant issues may also include whether it creates an avoidable hazard, unlawfully obstructs traffic, or breaches a general duty of care. The same question is owed in the other direction. Overtaking at speed with inches to spare, sounding the horn to hurry a rider along, or forcing past on a blind bend are equally matters of conduct rather than entitlement, and they place a person in danger rather than merely delaying one. The distinction matters, and it does not favour the motorist: inconsiderate riding may cost a following driver several minutes, whereas an impatient overtake on a blind bend may cost the rider a great deal more. The duty to exercise reasonable care runs in both directions; the consequences of neglecting it do not run equally. Neither impatience nor a delivery schedule converts an unsafe manoeuvre into a permissible one.

The difficulty changes character when riders travel in organised groups. A single cyclist can be passed at the first safe opportunity. Twenty or thirty riders occupy several hundred metres of carriageway and cannot be overtaken in one movement on a road that offers no straight section long enough to permit it. Conduct that is unobjectionable in an individual becomes, when multiplied, an obstruction that a following driver has no lawful means of clearing, and the queue that forms behind it is a consequence of the road's dimensions rather than of any driver's impatience. This is the complaint most often voiced by residents and professional drivers, and it concerns not whether each cyclist is entitled to be on the road, but whether the group's collective effect renders the road effectively unusable for anyone else.

The practical consequences extend beyond inconvenience. Residents may experience delays in accessing their homes. Commercial vehicles operate under delivery schedules and statutory driving-time rules. Emergency services may encounter additional obstacles where there is little or no room to pass safely. At that point, the issue is no longer merely one of convenience. It becomes a matter of public safety.

Infrastructure planning deserves closer scrutiny for the same reason. In many regions, cycle lanes have been created by narrowing existing carriageways rather than by building genuinely separate provision. Where those lanes then remain underused, because riders find the carriageway more convenient or better surfaced, the intended separation is lost, and the space left for everything else is narrower than before. Whether the fault lies in planning, maintenance, or user behaviour, policy has contributed to the conflict rather than resolving it.

Perceptions of fairness follow closely behind. Many motorists question why they contribute through vehicle taxes and other motoring-related charges while regularly encountering prolonged delays on roads where overtaking is impossible. Taxation, however, does not confer a proprietary claim over a public road. Public roads are generally funded through a mixture of general revenues, user-related charges and local or regional budgets, rather than being reserved for any one category of road user. A great many cyclists own cars, pay the same charges and live in the same villages; the neat division between road users belongs more to the debate than to the road. Nevertheless, perceptions influence public debate, and ignoring them does little to improve mutual understanding.

Perhaps the end of the summer is the right time to reflect on what we have seen on these roads, and to consider whether next year might be approached differently. Once again, the summer months have brought congestion, delay and near-misses on narrow coastal roads. The concern is not merely theoretical. According to the European Road Safety Observatory, 1,945 cyclists were killed on EU27 roads in 2023, accounting for 10% of all road fatalities. More strikingly, cyclist fatalities increased by 1% between 2013 and 2023, despite a 16% decline in total road fatalities over the same period.[1] Those figures describe European roads as a whole rather than any one stretch of coast in August, and they establish vulnerability rather than fault; but they explain a great deal about the terms on which this argument is conducted. Cyclists have good reason to defend their place on the road: for a rider, asserting that entitlement may sometimes be the only protection against being edged off the carriageway altogether. But entitlement and judgement are different questions. On roads where visibility is limited, overtaking is difficult and heavy traffic is unavoidable, the fact that recreational cycling is permitted does not by itself make every road equally appropriate for it.

The law cannot settle the vocabulary in which the question is put. The same queue on the same afternoon may be described as an obstruction, a delay, the assertion of a right or the protection of a vulnerable road user. Each description contains a perspective; none, by itself, resolves the problem. And for the person who has most to lose when judgement proves wrong, the question of what the law permits may not always be the only question worth asking.

[1] European Commission, European Road Safety Observatory, Facts & Figures – Cyclists (2025), CARE data for 2023, section 3.4, Figure 3.

Note: This article discusses general principles and does not constitute legal advice. Specific rules and their interpretation vary by jurisdiction.