[prennert]

Painted bicycle lanes are actually dangerous in my opinion. I cycle almost every day in London for now about 6 years. I avoid streets with painted cycle paths if I can (and take parallel side roads instead).

The way I see it, painted cycle lanes makes cyclists feel secure, but does not create much awareness by motorists. They are mainly used on roads with a lot of traffic. Because they are painted they have sometimes hazardous layouts crisscrossing mainlanes (to turn right). The blue ones can be very slippery when wet. I really don't trust them when it is wet.

Having a curb between the road and the cycle lanes, or elevating the cycle lanes on the level of the sidewalks is much saver for cyclists, because motorists can literally not cross over them. It also forces the planners to do a good job when designing junctions. For elevated cycle lanes though, paint can help rasing the awareness of pedestrians who often got in the habit of crossing anything without looking.

What TfL needs is having their planners cycle to work, and to generally rethink their approach to pedestrians and cyclists. The fact that most pedestrian traffic light are often showing red even if no traffic is routed through them and the fact that many junctions with traffic lights for cars (even big ones) do not have pedestrian traffic lights, reeducates everyone not to care about the lights and just walk into the traffic. This is almost as much a hazard to everyone as cars (on smaller roads.with speed bumps anyway), as pedestrians can cross without warning. If this happens this obviously creates the risk of a cyclist (cycling on the far outside of the road to avoid cars) either swerving into traffic or taking a pedestrian out.

[pjc50]

> What TfL needs is having their planners cycle to work

This. Like the stories of having ancient bridge designers stand under their bridges, the people designing cycling facilities should be made to use them in order to improve their safety and usability.

I think for a lot of planners having a week where they are given a cycle orienteering challenge around a set of random points in a city would be a huge benefit. Give each of them a cycle dashcam and call it a data-gathering exercise.

Take a look at e.g. https://www.innertubemap.com/ , a third-party compiled resource of off-street cycle routes in Edinburgh. What strikes you as wrong with it? The fact that it's a set of disjoint small graphs and not a proper mesh, perhaps?

More use can also be made of name-and-shame: http://wcc.crankfoot.xyz/facility-of-the-month/

[mruts]

Btw, what you are referring to is the Hammurabi Code. Engraved in Babylonian by the Mesopotamians.

[lucideer]

> painted cycle lanes makes cyclists feel secure, but does not create much awareness by motorists

> It also forces the planners to do a good job when designing junctions.

Living in Dublin, I have the opposite perspective on this.

I much prefer roads with painted lanes (or better, no cycle lanes), as having cyclists on the road necessarily makes motorists more aware of their existence (particularly when you have a lot of cyclists, so this effect increases with usage). I agree that painted lanes give more of a false sense of security to cyclists than anything (motorists will still ignore you if they can), but with segregated lanes they always ignore you.

This seems fine until you realise that well-planned segregated lanes are much more difficult to achieve (and where I live, an absolutel rarity—we have some of the most dangerously haphazard segregated lanes), and even very well-planned segregated lanes are still quite limiting in terms of cyclist movement. They lead to cycle congestion, cyclists become more of a danger to eachother, and you will always have entry/exit points which are far far more dangerous than if the cyclists had been on the road and visible all along.

On a more political level, they also reinforce the idea that roads belong to cars, and that cyclists, by using them, are invading them and should not be there.

[prennert]

On a political level, I think a lot is lost already - at least in London. I am seeing daily both "fundamentalist" behavior from both cyclists and motorists (rarely from pedestrians interestingly). I am catching myself sometimes not paying attention at zebras and junctions to pedestrians who did behave predictively. This usually happens because I am busy watching back and forth watching out for a speeding car (or a driver who clearly saw me but decides to pull out anyway), scooter, or cyclist.

My hope would be that segregating traffic would simplify what I need to pay attention to and I can focus more on pedestrians and other cyclists. The road sharing idea is a nice one. And TfL tried it in places, but realistically speaking it does not work out in a busy place which does not have a culture of watching out for each other.

I do agree though, that cycle lanes on street level separated by a curb from the street can be a pain. I wonder sometimes of they are made intentionally narrow and winding to slow down cyclists or if they are badly planned. Of course there are places where there is not a lot of space to give to a cycling lane. But often there is a lot of space, and it is not used.

In continental Europe cycle lanes are often on the same level as the pedestrian side walk. But I have never cycled in a large city where this is the case (except in Amsterdam for a few days). I wonder if that is a better solution or if it endangers pedestrians more.

[lucideer]

Having cycled briefly in a few cities in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Hague), and also in Copenhagen, I found the former cities excellent and the latter stressful.

Copenhagen tends strongly towards segregated lanes: you have to be extremely familiar with the city layout to be able to pre-empt where to enter & exit, and local cyclists come across quite aggressive if you're not constantly perfectly aware of where you're supposed to be going (and going fast enough for them). The lanes are claustrophic and hurried.

Turning at junctions works quite well (cyclists cross with traffic and loop backwards to wait to turn, rather than crossing lanes), but only with very large junctions; this doesn't scale downwards.

In the Netherlands on the other hand, road-sharing is very much the norm. The sheer number of cyclists means bad behaviour just does't seem to be an option for motorists: safety in numbers.

I think this is the real answer. I've seen "fundamentalist" behaviour from fellow cyclists, and it bothers me, but I think it's reactionary when the relationship with other road-users is strained. With growing numbers of cyclists, and shared road-space, I think this wanes. This has been my experience in Dublin anyway: nowhere near the numbers of Amsterdam, etc, but still, the numbers have significantly increased in recent years and the relationship has noticably improved (anecdotally).

[robertony]

If I compare cyclists in London (and, there are a lot) to pretty much anywhere in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the cyclists are far better behaved.

I don't have to worry for my life walking on a pavement that in the next moment a cyclist may decide to go on the pavement because there is a red light on the road at full speed, or almost knock me over, going across a zebra crossing when the light is green for pedestrians. Cyclists in London seem to think they can go regardless and no rule applies to them.

It wouldn't be too surprising in such a circumstance that they don't particularly feel safer with bike lanes.

I don't think this is a numbers issue.

[lucideer]

To clarify: I don't think having as many cyclists in London as in a Dutch city will bring about the kind of culture and benefits cyclists enjoy in Netherlands; there are so many other factors there.

All I'm saying is that having more cyclists brings about marked improvement for cyclists.

For your particular example (cyclists jumping onto the pavement), this is often down to bad planning. Signals and road layouts are designed exclusively for motorists in most cities, with the question of whether it's efficient to use (not just safe) for cyclists very unlikely to even be mentioned during planning. How fast you can get from A to B in a car is a question enormouse resources are poured into, with complex models developed. The same process is rarely applied to cyclists. If cyclists could get from A to B relatively efficiently without meeting unnecessary barries along their journey, you'd find a smaller minority would be feeling the need to hop on pavements and run reds* through crowds of pedestrians.

* Though on the subject of running reds in general, there's quite a few studies advocating things like the Idaho Stop and the Parisien laws on red lights. In my experience, pedestrian outrage at this behaviour is usually exaggerated and comes down to nothing more than anger at rule-breaking for the sake of it. Accidents whereby pedestrians are injured due to cyclists running reds don't factor highly in statistics.

[nizmow]

>The sheer number of cyclists means bad behaviour just does't seem to be an option for motorists: safety in numbers.

I was once almost hit by a car who didn't look coming from a side street in Amsterdam, the surge of cyclists behind me angrily shaking fists and yelling curses at the driver was quite something.

[VBprogrammer]

> I wonder sometimes of they are made intentionally narrow and winding to slow down cyclists

I think this raises an interesting point. There are cyclists and then there are cyclists. You have those people out with the kids or bumbling along on a Boris bike; and then you have power cyclists in all of the gear on a carbon framed bike averaging faster than most cars in London. While some cycle lanes are perfectly appropriate for the former, few are appropriate for the latter.

[nizmow]

That's a more difficult problem to fix. In Sydney, there are quite a few cycle lanes popping up but are almost all dominated by enthusiast cyclists in lycra on sports bikes, and I'd rather cycle on a road than deal with them. In the Netherlands, of course, cycling is a normal every day thing so the commuters far outnumber the enthusiasts and it's safer for everyone (enthusiasts / sport cyclists don't even bother trying to cycle during busy times, they'd be constantly stuck behind commuters).

[drcross]

Painted bike lines could have separated flexible bollards added to them which makes them far more effective.

[Angostura]

I have a slightly different perspective - I cycle daily in London and drive too. I think the painted lines do encourage drivers to think about their spacing and are better than nothing. The ones put on the pavement can be an absolute nightmare since pedestrians simply amble in your way onto the bike lane - I don't blame them its too easy.

If I want to cycle fairly briskly - say 15MPH - that can't be done on cycle lanes that share a pavement. It can be done on the road.

[paulmd]

They converted a 4-lane (2-lane each way) road near me into a 3-lane (1 each way + turning lane) with a wide buffer zone and a bike lane on each side. I see people taking the buffer zone as a lane all the time, just about had someone t-bone me a few months ago as I was turning and they tried to pass me in the buffer zone.

Grade separation or hard barrier, full stop.