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Video: Brussels Bike Jungle comically highlights crap bike lanes in BelgiumBrussels Bike Jungle screenshot

Video: Brussels Bike Jungle comically highlights crap bike lanes in Belgium

Painful-looking clip shows up poor infrastructure
by John Stevenson
Tue, Mar 10, 2015 10:27
10

Sometimes the best way to make a point is with humour. To highlight the inadequacy of cycling facilities in Belgian capital Brussels Bastien de Zutter made a video featuring his friend James riding into the various obstacles that plague the city's bike lanes.

Brussels Bike Jungle - The Impact Of Infrastructure, shows how alleged bike routes take people on bikes straight into traffic signs, bollards, streetlights, piles of rubbish and even a lane barrier.

It's by no means a problem unique to Brussels. Pete Owens' famous site Crap Cycle Lanes  has been highlighting terrible cycling facilities in the UK and beyond for over a decade. It even includes an example from Brussels.

De Zutter gives a nod on YouTube to New York film-maker Casey Neistat whose video Bike Lanes has clocked up a staggering 13 million views on YouTube. Neistat made Bike Lanes in 2011 after being ticketed for riding outside a bike lane, and emphatically made the point that you sometimes have no other choice.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last few years, here it is:

Brussels
Bastien de Zutter
Belgium
John Stevenson

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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10 comments

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youngie | 9 years ago
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Taiwan is pretty bad too. Ironic for a country in which a lot of the high end bikes are made. Here is an example of what it's like there: https://youtu.be/MqXNzBZcys8 40

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Mrmiik | 9 years ago
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Yeah this is a proper exaggeration of the situation here in BXLs. The bike infra is largely pretty decent with most streets having dedicated bike lanes or space set aside on the pavement. (As the red marked lanes show).

The issue is more the cultural problem of shocking driving in a very congested city.

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kevinmorice | 9 years ago
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Several of those he is actively searching for things to hit. One of them he purposefully goes straight on at a junction clearly marked for left turn only, another couple he intentionally attacks lamp-posts and traffic controls which are there to assist the cyclists and pedestrians and are tucked as far to the side of the lane as is practicable giving him plenty of room to avoid them.

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balmybaldwin | 9 years ago
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These videos are getting a bit old now.

Funny at first, but now think they encourage the view that cyclists falling over is funny rather than potentially lethal

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Matt eaton | 9 years ago
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This is exactly why I worry about increased segregation in the UK. I just don't think that we've got the political will to do it properly.

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Kim | 9 years ago
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Don't know why but I keep getting a 404 from the embedded link, this one works though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSFHsuNdYjA

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efail | 9 years ago
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I like where he has to lift his bike over the railings.

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Gkam84 | 9 years ago
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Some of the examples are extreme, but then I was watching it and thinking, no actually, if there were two cyclists heading towards each other, pedal strikes on bollards is a real danger.

That one over the barriers is clearly designed to improve their CX infrastructure 3

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wycombewheeler replied to Gkam84 | 9 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:

Some of the examples are extreme, but then I was watching it and thinking, no actually, if there were two cyclists heading towards each other, pedal strikes on bollards is a real danger.

That one over the barriers is clearly designed to improve their CX infrastructure 3

I thought it was for bunny hop training. But the guy didn't commit to it.

Also love the new york one where he goes into the back of the truck

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Jamminatrix | 9 years ago
0 likes

Those "lanes" are really, really bad. They're just arbitrarily painted markers hastily done to kick cyclists off the road.

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