Cycle Facility

Juneathon day 29: cycle 21.7 miles 1hr 43min

I know there is a well establish website with photos of idiotic cycle facilities but nevertheless I feel I should join in with a picture from today’s ride.

This is your basic cycle lane: a little bit of red edged with some white lines, not much wider than a bike. However our wonderful traffic engineers have obviously given it extra thought. “What happens” they wonder “at those points where pedestrians want to cross the road?”

Obviously waiting for a gap with no cars or bikes would be very difficult so they need to be able to do it in two stages: first avoid all the bikes, pause and then wait for a gap in the cars. Genius! To allow this to happen they have altered the line of the curb, bent the cycle lane and built a little traffic island. The result is that it is impossible to cycle round this barrier at normal speed so there is no point in using the cycle path and the pedestrians don’t have to worry about looking out for cyclists before reaching the island.

The sad thing about bad cycle facilities is that some of them are so bad they are laugh out loud funny, yet they have cost. Resources are put into their creation and the authorities can turn round and say we spent so much on promoting cycling but it hasn’t worked so we might just as well forget about it. The cyclists look on bemused and wonder what sort of training and qualifications traffic engineers have to have and whether it contains a module on making things useful. (Just look at a few of the pictures here, here, and here).

Enough whinging. The cycle facility made no difference to my ride, I was soon out onto quiet country lanes, cycling through woods or past farms. It is odd, I live in an overcrowded part of the world, and towns and major roads are proof of this, but when I am out on these little byways I feel I could be in a world of my own. Anyway, after a fairly relaxed ride, I came home, listened to some Jan Gabarek, ate a sandwich, drank a mug of tea and thought pleasant thoughts

Juneathon statistics 29/29
Run 20/29
distance 155.39km
time 14hr 45min
Cycle 6/29
distance 103.5 miles
time 7hr 59min
Gym 3/29
time 2hr 05min