Here is the latest of our student blogs by Scott McGill.

As a student and a person who is keen on exercise, I’ve found my preferred method of transport to be the bike.

Faster than most public transport, cheaper than driving and beneficial to your health, if you avoid getting knocked over, being a cyclist is the most economic form of travel in a city.

That is, until you take your bike out of the house, and onto the road. Between angry drivers who don’t think you should be on the road, to the negligence of pedestrians trying to walk out in front of you, it seems that everyone is out to get you killed.

And to top it off, we cyclists are expected to share our space on the road with the biggest, and most easily annoyed, public transport; busses.

It’s not hard to see that the most vulnerable and fluid of travellers, cyclists, aren’t going to mix well with the start-stop behaviour of buses and taxis.

When you’re pushing hard on the pedals to get to your destination, you don’t want to be cut off by something that takes up an entire lane, forcing you to slow down and make your way into a flow of traffic that doesn’t want to give you the space to over-take, only to be over-taken in turn on the next big uphill.

Next bus stop; repeat. Traffic lights; repeat.

This begins to create a division of priorities on the road, mingled with an unjust anger at other road users, and, in my experience, you don’t want to be stuck in the middle of a bus and a van, both getting mild forms of road rage, honking their horns, and you’re hoping that it’s not the day that they’re going to snap and decide that your life just isn’t worth the hassle of letting you get through unharmed. God forbid they are a minute late…

Let’s say that you do make it to work or school without any such incidents, you will still have to contend with the fumes.

We recently heard that over one million cars in the UK have been sold while not adhering to the emissions test standards meaning that there are a lot more dangerous exhaust fumes on the roads.

Once again, it’s cyclists that will feel the brunt of this, breathing heavily when we stop in traffic, inhaling lung-fulls of toxins at a time.

Cycling is supposed to be healthy.

We should be promoting it, not condemning it. We should be encouraging our places of work and study to get better cycling facilities. We should be asking our governments to come up with better cycle paths or alternative solutions.

In a time where we’re worrying about childhood (and adult) obesity, we should be looking at healthier methods of travel, for us and the environment.

We already have a perfectly good option. Cycling.