The first turning point for me came as I rode home and spotted the modest-sized minibus with the bright yellow “cyclists stay back” sticker pasted not, as usual, to the kerb side of the vehicle, but the driver's side.

As I passed – on that side; it was stationary in traffic – I asked the driver why he felt the sticker was needed. “It's because all these cyclists keep overtaking me in traffic,” he said, with confused anguish.

The next incident was just a few days later. I watched a small van nip through two consecutive lights some seconds after they turned red, leaving a view of the same yellow sticker disappearing into the distance.

Enough is enough, I said to myself, with the resigned and impotent fury of Furious from South London.

Stickers, you say? Why should a sticker enrage you so? For two reasons. Firstly, the “cyclists stay back” message is, at best, over-simplistic and misleading, at worst outright dangerous victim-blaming. Secondly, because these stickers, astonishingly, are issued by the UK's biggest single regional authority supposedly tasked with improving the cyclists' lot, Transport for London (TfL).

Let's start at the beginning.

Varieties of stickers warning cyclists specifically against riding up the inside of big lorries have become common around the UK over the years. This caution is, for the most part, sensible – many lorries, particularly construction trucks, have appalling blind spots and they are involved in a disproportionate number of cycling fatalities, often when turning left across riders.

There is a separate debate to be had as to how or why we allow trucks with such blind spots to share urban streets with human beings, but that's for another time. In the interim – and it's likely to be a long interim given the recent baffling decision of the European parliament to delay the introduction of new, safer lorry cabs for eight years – it's a good idea for cyclists to avoid the inside of big trucks.

The problem began when TfL started issuing the “cyclist stay back” stickers. Even on lorries this is a blunt and troubling message. If I'm near a lorry in traffic I'll always do my best to get in front of it as soon as possible for my own safety, albeit passing by the right side. The stickers don't just give a too blunt message on safe riding, the word choice implicitly places the responsibility for safety on the cyclist, not the driver.

What is worse is that these stickers have started to spread. First they appeared on buses, then taxis, then all sorts of small vans, even cars. These are not vehicles with significant blind spots. Some users are directly affiliated to TfL. But others have begun using them, for example my local council, Southwark, and private firms like Virgin Media.

While originating in London, the stickers are now beginning to spread nationwide.

As an alliance of cycling and road safety organisations pointed out to TfL in a letter earlier this year, stickers on vehicles with perfectly good visibility gives the “implication that cyclists are second-class road users who should defer to motor vehicle users”, and apparently absolves drivers of their responsibility to properly use their mirrors.

The worry is that this message is already being absorbed by other road users, much like my minibus driver who presumably believes cyclists should remain stationary in traffic. The CTC has been told of a case in which a cyclist cut up by a left-turning lorry phoned the driver's company to complain, to be told: "Didn't you see the lorry's 'stay back' sticker?" It also noted with worry an inquest where lawyers for a driver pointed out a vehicle's sticker intimating the dead cyclist might have been at fault.

An open and shut case, you'd think. But TfL, for reasons known to themselves, see it differently.

When I asked TfL if they were happy with the stickers appearing on small vehicles they provided a quote from Ben Plowden, director of surface strategy and planning. It said:

"We are not aware of any evidence that suggests the design of these stickers is reducing their effectiveness in promoting safer behaviour, among either van, lorry drivers or cyclists. We are always open to suggestions about how we can improve safety and we will look at whether the design of future stickers should be changed to further improve their value."



As an aside, TfL argued that it would take “a substantial amount of time and money” to change the stickers, while to offer different stickers for different vehicles was “incredibly resource-intensive”.

To which I say, as politely as possible: nonsense.

The problem is, with TfL refusing to budge, no one else will. I asked Virgin Media why some of their small vans carry the message. They said the one I had spotted belonged to a contracting company which believes the stickers “increase the awareness for everyone”. More pertinently, they added, any vehicle working on a TfL project has to have the sticker, and to avoid any confusion they're now being fitted to all vans nationally.

I asked the same question of Southwark council, who provided me with a very, very long quote from Barrie Hargrove, the councillor whose remit covers transport, which basically argued that any sticker scheme had to be London-wide and so they were doing what everyone else did.

Luckily, not everyone is being so silly. Coach operator National Express has teamed up with Sustrans to produce a warning sticker pointing to the kerb side of a coach, saying, “Caution: blind spots”.

So what's stopping the others? I'd argue this: for all the public talk about encouraging cycling it remains a niche form of transport in Britain, and that is reflected in the mindsets of the senior officials who make these decisions. If the “cyclists stay back” sticker gives the message that cyclists are second-class road users, tolerated if only we restrain ourselves, don't get to uppity and make room for the grown-ups with their engines and smelly exhausts ... well, that's what a lot of them probably think, even unconsciously.

Those of you unfortunate to watch this week's ITV exploitative and alarmist contribution to the roads debate, Road Rage Britain, will have had a reminder of the mainstream UK narrative on cyclists. We're oddballs, law-breakers, light-jumpers, non-tax payers. It's a message, I fervently believe, which infects the minds of other road users and makes everyone who rides a bike marginally but incrementally less safe every time they get in the saddle.

It's not as if the UK couldn't do with more cyclists. As a nation we are so inactive that more than a third of adults in England are a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This is a full-blown public health disaster, which wrecks lives and could quite credibly bankrupt the NHS. The saintly Chris Boardman, British Cycling's campaigner-in-chief, called the crisis “staggering”, pointing out that regular exercise like cycling can halve the diabetes risk.

Amid all this, what does the authority that spends more on cycling than anyone outside Whitehall want cyclists to do? Stay back. Defer. Know your place. It's pathetic.