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“Mikey, you fucking tosser!” I’m cycling around Knightsbridge with Michael van Erp, AKA Cycling Mikey, when a man in a silver Mini Cooper SUV leans out of his window to scream at us.
Erp cackles, but he’s hunting a different target. Then he sees it: a driver idling in the late afternoon gridlock while scrolling his phone. Perfect. Erp pedals over to the forest green Range Rover and leans into the driver-side window, straining on his tiptoes to make sure his head-mounted camera captures the encounter. Wide-eyed, the driver winds down his window. “Is that you?”
In a few weeks, once Erp has sent the footage to the authorities and uploaded it to his 120,000 YouTube subscribers, this man will receive a notice of intended prosecution by the Metropolitan Police. He’ll receive six points on his license and at least a £200 fine. It’s little use trying to appeal. If he does, a grinning and besuited Erp will see him in court.
This, in a nutshell, is what Michael van Erp does. Since 2019, the one-man road safety crusader has reported over 2,400 drivers to the Met. He’s caught celebrities like Guy Ritchie and Frank Lampard using their phones at the wheel, and even had a junction in Hyde Park nicknamed “Gandalf’s corner” for his tendency to stand in the road blocking wrong-way traffic. His reports have led to at least 2,721 penalty points, £168,568 in fines and, as he proudly displays in his X (Twitter) bio, “36 drivers DISQUALIFIED”.
The man himself (Photo: Harry Mitchell)
Erp’s antics have garnered him a certain level of public notoriety. The Daily Mail listed him as one their top 12 villains of 2024 (alongside Oasis and school dinners), labelling him “the bane of London's roads due to his holier than thou antics”.
But in the past year, the intensity and violence of his videos seems to have ramped up. Last August, Erp went viral for a video in which an apoplectic Fiat 500 driver smashes deliberately into him, sending his 28kg electric bike scattering across the road. In December, he uploaded a video of himself being punched and kicked by a gas plumber called Gavin Kiernan, after Erp filmed him driving whilst texting near Hyde Park.
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