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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”.
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.
After almost two decades patrolling London’s streets, and despite the almost daily affronts to his own safety — threats which he sometimes seems to relish — Erp is more prolific than ever. I wanted to understand more about the man behind Cycling Mikey. What makes someone like this? And why is his arch nemesis a lawyer called Mr Loophole?
A motorist bogeyman
After watching him in action on the bike, Erp and I go to the cafe of the V&A to talk about where it all started. In his interviews with national newspapers, the tragedy of Erp’s father’s death has been hailed as his inciting moment. Now in his 50s, Erp was 19 and still living in his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, when he got the call from a local shopkeeper telling him that a drunk driver had collided with his father, who was riding a motorbike. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late. He found his father’s body under a blanket. “I’m long past that”, he says in his thick Zimbabwean accent, swilling his tea. “But my feeling is that if I can save someone else that experience, then that’d be quite a good thing.”
Erp is softly spoken and amiable. He’s bald and slightly weather-beaten, and has a habit of fixing a broad grin at you after making some small joke, which he’ll then drop completely to resume talking straight-faced about road safety. And he’s keen to emphasise that what really motivated him to begin filming bad drivers was simply the experience of cycling on London roads.
It was the early 2000s, and after moving to London for work (first in IT, then as a rollerskating teacher), he started to feel traumatised when out riding his recumbent bike. “I remember almost feeling like, have I got PTSD from that long commute?” he says. When I suggest that perhaps his choice of bike contributed to his sense of unease — recumbents are roughly wheel height — he cuts me off.
“It's a misconception that lots of people have”, he says slightly frustratedly. “You're actually more visible to drivers and you put the shit up drivers much more quickly, because they're like, ‘oh, what is that?’” It’s a classic Erp response: slightly self-righteous, heavy on the scientific reasoning and belying a ready willingness to place himself in harm’s way if he feels he’s in the right.
Erp began filming himself for protection in 2006, as soon as bike-mounted video cameras hit the market. He talks about these early devices like some talk about classic cars, reminiscing to me about his first: an ungainly, telescope-like camera called the Oregon Scientific. As he amassed a small following on YouTube, he would occasionally burn footage of dangerous divers onto DVDs and take the evidence down to his local police station. But the authorities rarely did anything.
It wasn’t until 2018 that these small acts of witness started turning into real prosecutions. Andy Cox, head of the Met’s roads and traffic policing unit, announced that the force would begin prosecuting drivers on the basis of dashcam footage. “The police cannot be everywhere all of the time, but the public can be,” Cox said. And so a star was born: Erp became a prolific chronicler of road crime.
With the prospect of prosecutions now a real possibility, Erp’s desire for small-time accountability morphed into something more ambitious. By posting regularly and building a public profile, he realised he could turn himself into a kind of motorist bogeyman. “I’m like a demon on the shoulder of London drivers,” he proudly tells me.
As his infamy among the city’s motorists grew, so did his renown among London cyclists, for whom Erp’s videos seemed to capture the entitlement and aggression they’d had to deal with for years. The ITV presenter Jeremy Vine, a devotee of Erp and a fellow cycling videographer himself, reached out to the Zimbabwean.
Soon, the pair were co-producing viral videos together, including a memorable incident when Erp captured a taxi driver claiming that he would kill himself if the footage of him driving on his phone was given to the police. “The way I saw that was just pure crocodile tears,” Erp says, bluntly. “I'm not a police officer, and I don't ever want to be. But I feel like I've gained some of that shell maybe. I’m very cynical.”
After diligently uploading the encounter to the Met’s crime portal, he sent over the footage to Vine, who clipped and captioned it. It racked up millions of views and boosted Erp’s profile even further. Erp may not be an officer, but Vine says his work should merit a police pension. “I think he's done so much for road safety,” the latter tells me. “There are definitely people alive today who wouldn't be if it wasn't for Mike.”
Mikey’s archenemy: Mr Loophole
Not all are so grateful. As Erp’s star has grown, so has the hate he’s suffered. The standard critique is that he’s a grass who should mind his own business. It takes only a brief scroll through Instagram or X to gauge the intensity of this feeling: one recent X post with 16,000 likes described a video of Erp being struck at a roundabout as “Cycling Mikey, a notorious snitch from the UK hit by a car on his bike…😂😂😂”
Erp claims the hate doesn’t bother him. In fact, he frames negative content as an opportunity. “I'll repost [with] something like ‘anybody can report road crime, thanks for helping me to spread the word,’” he says earnestly, leaning forward over the cafe table to emphasise his point.
But if there’s one person who does get under his skin, it’s Nick Freeman. A smooth-talking defence lawyer who looks not unlike former wrestling promoter Vince McMahon, Freeman specialises in getting high profile individuals off of driving prosecutions. He has represented six motorists filmed by Erp, most famously former Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard. Despite Erp capturing Lampard driving with a phone in one hand and a coffee in the other, Freeman managed to get the case dropped, on the grounds that you couldn’t technically see that Lampard’s phone was switched on.
Such feats have led to Freeman being referred to as Mr Loophole in the press, a moniker which he stresses he did not choose. “It suggests something underhand and devious,” he says. He’s trademarked it, though: “I've worked very hard to get to Mr. Loophole,” he boasts. “I've earned it.”
If you ask Freeman, “cycling vigilantes” like Erp make the roads more dangerous. “I understand his father was killed by a drink driver, and that's what motivates him,” he says. “But then maybe he should have become a policeman.” In fact, Freeman argues, for roads to be safer, bikes should have to adopt number plates.
Cyclists are responsible for just a fraction of deaths on the road, making Freeman’s focus on bikes a little strange. But when I put this to him, he baulks. “Not many people die by cannibalism every year, do they? But are we suggesting that because not many people die by cannibalism, we don't actually introduce legislation to outlaw it?”
It’s this kind of cyclist bashing — equating his preferred mode of transport with devouring the flesh of his fellow human beings — that drives Erp. “There is kind of a unique hatred that cyclists get,” he says glumly, a view that is backed up by most tabloid coverage of him (see the Daily Mail’s joyful labelling of Erp as a “pedalling pest”). When out cycling, he has to clip his camera to a carabiner on his belt buckle to stop people from yanking it off.
Whatever the justness of his cause, though, Erp does have a tendency to frame his plight in somewhat grating terms. At one point in our interview, he suggests that cyclists are “probably the last minority group it’s okay to hate” — a description that seems unlikely to win over any skeptics of his work.
He’s often pious when describing his videos, telling The Times in 2023 that “it’s not my hobby. It’s not something I like doing. It’s an unpleasant civic duty”. How, I ask, does he square such humble aims with his flamboyant tendency to brandish a 3D-printed red card — complete with the Cycling Mikey YouTube logo — at London drivers like a referee? “I don’t know. I feel it’s a bit cringe, to be honest,” he admits sheepishly. “It’s only if they're really being arsey towards me that I'll use that.”
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‘I won't deny liking it when someone decides to take it to that level’
The tension of Erp’s content is that he’s doing a positive thing, something that has taken dangerous drivers off the roads, while sometimes being annoying as he does it. And therein lies the appeal. It is a deeply revealing test of character, when committing a minor traffic violation, to look up and see a brash Dutch-Zimbabwean laying down the highway code. Few watch Cycling Mikey for road safety. They’re there for the reactions.
Erp insists that none of this is put on or to get attention. “What you see on the videos is generally my exact character, all the time,” he says animatedly. Erp diligently uploads every day, the vast majority of which are uneventful interactions with non-celebrity drivers. Serious confrontations are rare. “I won't deny liking it when someone decides to take it to that level; it's going to do well,” he tells me. “But that's not my reason.” But Freeman doesn’t buy it. “It's provocative to people,” he says. “He's not authorised to do what he's doing, and there’s always that potential public order threat” given to those who lash out after Erp winds them up.
He appears to be one of those people who simply does not do things by half measures. When he tells me that he built his own custom water-cooled gaming PC, I remark that he must be a hardcore player. Only a casual one, he laughs; he’s actually “a hardcore model aircraft pilot”. Erp is currently training for the European gliding championships in Aboville, France, where he will be representing the Netherlands. You can sometimes see a fridge-shaped box strapped to the side of his bike — that would be his model glider.
With so much hate out on the roads, Erp’s family (he has two sons and is divorced) have pleaded with him to stop. So have his employers. He works as a carer for a young man with Down’s Syndrome — Erp tells me that teaching him how to rollerskate as a child is one of his proudest achievements — and he has arrived at work dripping with blood after being attacked. “They’d prefer me not to, but they know I'm doing it because it's right and because it's in my character,” Erp says.
Many would have taken the near-death experience last year, when the Fiat 500 driver drove directly into him, as a moment to reconsider their life choices. Not Erp. When I ask what he did for the rest of the day, he looks at me blankly. “Went out and Gandalf’d a load more people.”
I press Erp about where his mindset comes from. He went to a strict Jesuit school, he says, where they attempted to instil a firm sense of right and wrong. “Some of the manners they beat into have us stuck,” he tells me, not entirely joking.
He was beaten regularly, but says that it was the overall experience of the school — its emphasis on discipline and self-betterment — that had the most lasting effect. “I don't mean just beatings, I mean consequences for misbehaviour,” Erp explains. “They tried to minimise the bad aspects and promote the learning experience.”
It’s an ethos which Erp has carried through into his work today. You need to do something about bad behaviour, he says, “so that people will learn from it and not do it in the future.” It’s also the reason why he will attend court if people appeal. “I wish I could teach them without punishment, but the reality is that the first point at which most drivers will learn is being prosecuted.”
This emphasis on learning extends to himself. Erp is highly self-critical, and it’s hard to accuse him of hypocrisy: in 2024, he posted a video of himself accidentally running a red light as a driver, a decision he made to hold himself to the same standards as he does other people. It led to a torrent of online abuse.
For all the stunts and the confrontations, all the thousands of videos and merciless Gandalfing, at his core Erp is simply just extremely devoted to improving road safety. He won’t be stopping any time soon, and he doesn’t care what you think.
If you’re a hater, then good. You’re only helping him to spread the message.
