The BBC reports a ruling by a top Polish court that Poland’s cyclists may face imprisonment for riding while intoxicated, as do drivers of motor vehicles.

This has to be the right answer, despite the ingenious but specious counter argument that cyclists should be treated as pedestrians who face lesser punishment for being drunk on public roads, as in both cases they are using their own muscle power to move along.

Unless you have seen it with your own eyes, it is hard to grasp just how blind drunk people on bicycles and indeed pedestrians can be in former Communist Europe, especially in rural areas (although the wide boulevards of Moscow late at night are also prone to appalling accidents involving drunk pedestrians reeling around aimlessly far from the pavement).

Once I was being driven by Embassy driving legend George (Jerzy) towards Poznan along a country road. We rounded a corner. There immediately ahead of us was a man on a bicycle wobbling precariously in our direction.

He had a zero chance of not falling off the bike. 

The 100% chance of falling off divided neatly: either a 50% chance of falling across the road and being flattened and maybe causing us to be seriously injured too; or a 50% chance of falling the other way into the ditch. 

Fate smiled on him as on us. Into the ditch he sprawled.

On a separate occasion when on the 2006 Marie Curie 500km bike ride across Poland our group of riders stopped for a breather. We watched the police appear from nowhere and apprehend a local yokel cyclist scarely able to stand, let alone ride. Later some of our riders watched an elderly intoxicated Polish woman cyclist wobble her way into a ditch. She got up, somehow managed to get back on her bike, and wobbled off down the road.

This Balkan YouTube clip gives the general idea of the law enforcement issues at stake (plenty more examples if you want to be depressed at the human condition):