When you’re cycling in a city you should expect the unexpected – especially if you’re sharing the road with a lorry in a hurry. Luckily no one seems to have been seriously hurt in this incident, but it must have been a shocking experience for everyone there. One of the cyclists has uploaded a couple of photos, and the story was picked up by the Guardian and NY Times websites, among others.
[Edit: this image is just an image, not a video or an external link.]


The Guardian reported that the Mayor of London and the UK transport minister “peddled” round a corner. They may have been pedalling, but I don’t think they were peddling anything. The two activities do not go well together: presumably even cyclists who peddle from the saddle would not attempt to do so without stopping.
The newspaper’s own style guide has the following entries for these near-homonyms:
pedaller: cyclist
peddler: drug dealer
pedlar: hawker
Peddler can mean more than “drug dealer”: one can peddle goods of all kinds, though the word sometimes carries connotations of dubious or illicit activity. But the guide is deliberately very concise; I am not disputing its entries, I am reproving the website editing. Whether the mistake was the writer’s or an editor’s, it was a careless one – though not as careless (or dangerous) as the lorry driver’s.