“Recipe for disaster” – Bournemouth cycle lane invites cyclists to ride between car doors and oncoming traffic

Pretty much every one way road in the Netherlands is like this. The problem isn't with the idea, the problem will be with the acceptance of cyclists being allowed to 'break the rules'

Quote:

“Engineers also undertook a safety assessment of this arrangement prior to proceeding including cycling the route."

And they probably said it was a bad idea unless the road wasn't busy. The council muppets then told them the road wasn't really that used as it was a side road.

Quote:

“The opening up of one-way streets into contraflow cycle routes is now common practice in the UK and local authorities are being actively encouraged by the Department for Transport to do this, as a result of new legislation which makes this more achievable by councils where suitable.

However most councils who have implemented them aren't complete muppets and choose roads:

1. Where cars can park with four wheels on the road

2. There are marked parking spaces for cars meaning that the entire road doesn't have two lanes of cars parked on both sides, so if a car meets a cyclist or vice versa either one can easily get out of the way.

3. That aren't busy if the road is narrow.

This kind of shit will hardly encourage the casual cyclist to 'nip to the shops' on their bike. And which idiot is heading up the local cycle forum??

It has worked really well in conjunction with serious restrictions on driving and presumed liability, but seems a bit optomistic without either of those.

Fucking morons.

Belligerent response from the council. I wonder if the engineers who cycled it were seasoned cyclists?

Dangerous for pedestrians too. One way street, only likely to be looking if a car is coming, despite the green paint

Made the mistake of looking at the comments section on the Bournemouth Echo website.  First anti-cyclist post out of 71 commnets? Number 2. Surprised it took two tbh!

No wonder Dave Gorman calls it (comment section) the 'bottom of the internet', as it's usually full of shit. And yes I do realise the irony of me saying this in an internet comments section!

Never mind the shit infrastructure (par for the course), what I want to know is why nobody seems able to paint a bike on the road with a standard diamond frame?

I don't really understand what the purpose of this actually was...  I would have thought far too many people would assume cyclists could/would only ride on the green paint and then, what?, get off and walk?  If the intention was to allow contraflow cycling on that road, then a simple entry point and signage - and some serious restrictions on where people could park their cars along that road - would have been better rather than a few metres of green paint. 

Maybe it was meant to go all the way along the road as a contraflow but the builders couldn't finish it because of the parked cars?  

Although, that wouldn't change the net outcome, would just mean that cars would have a nice bit of green tarmac to park on.

I'm not in favour of crap cycling infrastructure. In this case, might it not be useful to be allowed to ride up this otherwise one-way road?

People should drive slowly and carefully on this residential street, because there are lots of parked cars, and the possibility of someone stepping out to cross the road. If they do so, and I realise it's a big if, it should be easy enough for a person on a bike to negotiate their way past a vehicle coming the other way.

Speachless.
The worst part of this is that money that has been set a side for cycling infrastructure has been utterly wasted on this sh#t