Three quarters of a mile up the road towards Elephant and Castle there's a five metre wide segregated bus and cycle lane. That can't accommodate all the cyclists of the morning rush hour and that is i) five metres wide and ii) not immediately bottlenecked by a light controlled junction.
Confining that number of London rush-hour cyclists at the Oval to that small a space while accommodating two diverging paths and traffic lights is a recipe for constant blue on blue incidents. The southbound A3/A23 junction has barely any capacity at all before the separate streams will foul.
The consequences of encountering any misbehaving traffic, of any type, look far more severe, harder to mitigate and likely to be more frequent than at present.
Looking solely at cyclists' behaviour, using the straight, consistent CS7 along Kennington Park Road is dicey enough at the moment. Now I am happy to recognise that the boom in cycling means that some of the pleasures of London cycling past have gone forever, that sharing a wonderfully convenient mode of transport with countless thousands is going to be slightly less convenient than those times when I was seemingly tootling around on my own twenty-five years ago, I shall never dash from the fringes of Bromley to the Southbank in under twenty minutes ever again; the gains of a wider recognition and enjoyment of cycling though are worth the compromises and they are easy and sensible accommodations to make. These changes at Oval are not sensible, and I can see few cyclists that currently use the junction materially benefiting, further there are probably an awful lot of people that will fail to make sensible accommodations for this sub-standard design and make its daily use even more unpleasant and fraught. It seems to be a scheme for exporting the congestion, frustration and some of the worries of motoring to the world of cycle commuting. This will be a barrier to many taking up or continuing cycling. I don't think a better attempt could be made at limiting capacity on a 'cycle superhighway'.
