The torrent of invective on the vexed question of pavement cycling leads On Yer Bike to insist: it is never OK to cycle on the pavement. Regarding Jessica Byles's letter, Why we ride on the pavements (Oxford Mail, August 17), we get into all sorts of sticky problems if we start saying that pavement cycling is OK sometimes.

Pavement cycling causes great anxiety and, in rare cases, injury. The police are doing their best to stop pavement cycling. I hope that the limited cycle training available across the county will train a skeleton crew of new cyclists how to behave.

But to those who insist that they need to cycle on the pavement, I urge you - change the rules, do not break them. If the roads are "too dangerous", the answer is in taming the roads, not in transferring on to the pavements the very danger you yourself seek to escape. This is not a hopeless 'if'. Cyclox is working with the council to make the road network safer in all sorts of ways. Get involved.

When I'm not walking, 95 per cent of the times that I leave my home I go by bike. That's why I regard myself as a 'cyclist', and the same is true of thousands of others in Oxfordshire who cycle a lot.

'Cyclists' stop at red lights, they don't cycle on the pavement and they are generally good news. But there's another bunch out there. They're "same same but different", as they say in south-east Asia. They look the same as a cyclist, so it's an easy mistake to make - but they are not one of us.

It is these people - let's call them "un-cyclists" - we're moaning about. An un-cyclist knows that a bicycle is the cheapest and quickest way of getting about. And so, in the spirit of un-cycling, they razz about as quickly as two wheels allow.

"Cycling furiously" remains a misdemeanour which the average person, myself included, couldn't define if their bike depended on it. However, I feel certain that "cycling furiously" refers to unruly un-cyclist behaviour.

Un-cyclists' more obvious offences include jumping red lights and ploughing through busy zebra crossings ("I didn't think I had to stop"); riding at night without lights ("I thought it was OK if I was on the pavement"); and the nadir of polite bicycle behaviour: cycling on pavements.

I contend that none of these problems would exist, or at least that they would occur so rarely and so harmlessly as to not constitute a "problem", if the only two-wheelers out there were "cyclists".

But the darned un-cyclists are out there as well, and we can't encourage or condone their already bad behaviour by setting them a bad example. No proper cyclist would ever jump a red light and I would hope that a cyclist caught short without lights (get a dynamo!) would wheel their bike.

And while we all know that there are a few "cyclists" who break the pavement-cycling rule, that doesn't mean that we can say it's OK. Change the system; don't break the rules.