What is it about climbing on a bicycle that transforms so many ordinary men and women into dangerous projectiles?

What is it about these machines, with a delightful history dating back nearly 200 years, that make so many cyclists not only happy to flout the law but aggressive towards anyone foolhardy enough to mention it? Surely it cannot just be that horrid leather saddle.

However, it is wonderful news that at last, Brighton and Hove police have recognised a real problem exists. They have launched a crackdown on the menaces who ride on pavements, ignore red traffic lights, treat one way streets as a personal affront and 'no cycling' signs as a direct challenge to their individual freedom. I applaud the police initiative. It should be given our fullest support.

The £30 fixed penalty tickets handed out to four teenage boys were well deserved. Refusal to pay should be dealt with firmly, possibly by banning them from riding or even confiscating their bicycles.

They had already been warned by police in a patrol car not to ride on the pavement and pretended they did not know it was unlawful. They then rode on and, minutes later, did the same thing again, which was when the same police properly wrote their tickets.

This time the youths used the even lamer excuse of having to avoid an oncoming car.

What makes this minor incident so significant is the risible response of one of the boys' parents who accused the police of 'going completely over the top' and picking on soft targets.

Go for a walk any weekend along the promenade between the Peace Statue in Hove and the Lagoon. It must have more, prominent, 'no cycling' signs per kilometre than any other stretch of walkway in the land.

Yet you will see a succession of apparently law-abiding parents on bicycles leading their cycling children through all these signs. And when the children query the signs, as I heard on one occasion, the response was: "Don't worry, they don't matter."

Well, they do matter! They matter very much. Ignoring the signs may not be the violent anarchy to provoke an armed response from a team of police marksmen, but it is where the first seeds are sown for a disregard for the law.

It is these silly, irresponsible parents who pretend they can draw a line between laws you ignore and laws you obey.

Those children become the aggressive young cyclists who regularly use the promenade as a race-track, regardless of the danger to pedestrians.

They become the commuters using it illegally as a way to work, rushing the wrong way along one way streets, ignoring traffic lights and all the rest of it.

But bikers are as big a problem in Boulogne, Bombay and Brisbane as they are in Brighton.

Perhaps a more soothing version of that appalling leather saddle might be the international solution!