Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#2The point of many of these cycle lanes is not to be useful to cyclists but to be useful to the council's PR.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#3This waist could be "understandable" if UK was a pioneer in this field. There are countries with excellent biking infrastructure already. Learn from them.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#4As a dutchman i beg to differ.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#5Is any money getting spent on painted bicycle lanes in the UK? I'm surprised to hear that, because the very few I've seen there were a joke. The similar joke examples shown in this article don't seem far-fetched based on my (limited) experience in the UK.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#6As a dutchman i beg to differ.
The point of the article is not that the bike lanes are useless. Rather that the way they are implemented is woefully inadequate.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#7As someone who has recently started to use cycle lanes to move around London I disagree with the view expressed in the article. Many of the cycle lanes I use everyday in West / Central London are only painted.
I personally feel much safer in a cycle lane, even if only a painted one, simply because I don't have to worry as much about getting side-swiped by a bus. Seeing the end of a painted cycle lane is a good indication that the road ahead requires more complex navigation and will often cause me to slow down and be more cautious.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#8The title of the article is a bit inaccurate, the main criticism is that badly marked bike lanes are a waste of money that could better be spend on more adequate infrastructure (so bike lanes that adhere to minimum safety standards etc.)
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#9Bike lanes exist to get bicycles "out of the way," which is why we have a decades-long alliance between the car-insurance lobby and the sell-bicycles lobby to get bikes off the road and on to facilities.
This is a losing strategy for people who actually ride bikes, the correct one is to lower speed limits.
Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer
#10Painted 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.