Another week goes by and another load of miles racked up on the bike. On average, my weekly mileage is around 100 miles; my daily commute is about 20 miles, plus anything I do in the evenings or at weekends.

Some weeks it's a lot more and some weeks it's less, but this means that I cover over 5,000 miles every year on a bicycle.

This means that I spend a lot of time in the saddle and get to see lots of good and bad cyclists and lots of good and bad motorists. I always try very hard when writing this blog to make sure that I present a balanced viewpoint and always state if something is my opinion.

I was very surprised last week to see the letter printed from P Hornby: “REGARDING all your stories about cyclists, although I understand their problems with motorists, they are also to blame for much of this. Eighty per cent don’t have any lights and 90 per cent do not know what a red light means at traffic lights.”

I would very interested "P" to see where you get your statistics from. You state them so clearly that they must be the result of a great deal of research and must be factual!

Can you sense my subtle sarcasm? Quite clearly this letter represents "P's" opinion and the "facts" that they state are very far from the truth. However it worries me greatly as there are people out there that will read this kind of uninformed rubbish and actually believe it.

Just substitute the word "cyclist" with "women drivers" or "Muslim" and then read the letter again. Not only would people be up in arms about it but in some case it would be breaking the law.

The number of cyclists on the road is increasing and is going to continue to increase so it's really important that we try and change people's attitudes and get more acceptance. Cyclists do have a right to be on the road and we must all learn to share the space.

A really good example is an incident that happened to me last week.

I took my road bike to work last week, so I had gears and a much higher cruising speed that usual. At one point on my ride home after coming down a hill I was riding at about 30-35 miles an hour. I left a safe braking gap between myself and the car in front that was travelling at the same speed as me.

What I don't understand is why the car behind had to overtake me? I was slightly exceeding the speed limit and there was no safe gap to pull into in front of me. I can only assume that this driver saw a bicycle and just had to overtake irrespective of my speed. I am sure that this driver would not have overtaken me if I had been in a car or riding a motorbike, attitudes need to change...I am part of the traffic!

I want to finish off this week with a request. There have been some comments from people suggesting that they don't like this blog; some of the comments appear to be from cyclists. People are still reading which is nice, but I would prefer people to enjoy reading it!

I am under no illusion that I can please everybody, but if you tell me what you want I'll see what I can do. Just bear in mind that I'm not an employee of the newspaper and I don't work in the cycle industry, I am just a cyclist who got fed up with not seeing any positive or balanced views in print.

Based on information supplied by David Brown.