Yeah agreed. There's a new bike path on Lea Bridge Road, London. While I welcome it, I realize I need to keep the speed low even though it's not as badly done as other paths (car drivers actually stop when entering and exiting the side roads, usually). Most cyclists still ride a bit too fast on it though; there are kids and families, people strolling onto the bike path when getting off the bus, but they're no where near as bad as on other similarly designed bike paths.
You clearly don't know the London cycling scene, where the implicit threat of multi-ton motor vehicles had been used as a means to get us off the normal roads like the A11. There are reasons not to use some of the cycleways, including needing to reach destinations not on them or using cycle types that don't fit well, or simply avoiding cycleway congestion when there's an underutilised carriageway, but I doubt we'd've seen quite such a sustained increase without them and stuff like London's Kidical Mass pretty much definitely wouldn't have happened without. Many of us posting on forums like this were cycling before, braving the bus lanes or weaving our ways through backstreets and cut-throughs, and we're acutely (sometimes painfully, especially with certain CS2/CS3 crap junctions in East London) aware of the mistakes made as TfL learnt on the job rather than learning from other countries, but I think overall the cycleways made cycling easier and more peaceful for many people. To keep on repeating the same motoring-centric vehicularist designs and expecting different results would be the disaster.
I think that's a slightly different situation. As far as I know, the safety evidence is weak for cycleways in general and I doubt the CS are any better. I say they're easier in various ways and I find them less stressful because I don't enjoy being tailgated by a long stream of motorists, but I don't feel I can say they're necessarily safer - the devil is in the detail and sadly most UK authorities still stuff up junction details most of the time, including TfL on some CS2 junctions - I think if you search @subaqua's posting history, you'll see painful examples
And was that stretch built to the current London Cycle Design Standards? Rubbish sightlines and loads of give-ways sounds like a relic from the past, but while councils aren't compelled to follow one of the better design manuals or standards, there's probably some toxic councils still building them... but bad councils build new roundabouts that are extremely hazardous for cycling too and we don't go overboard and start ranting about how that justifies avoiding all carriageways.
In the past 100 years or so, people cycling have been squeezed out of road space because roads, towns and cities are being designed around the car. Bicycling doesn't get much, if any, consideration by planners. While riding along like you're a car is a valiant act of defiance, it isn't going to stop cycling as transport from flatlining.
I think that's a slightly different situation. As far as I know, the safety evidence is weak for cycleways in general and I doubt the CS are any better. I say they're easier in various ways and I find them less stressful because I don't enjoy being tailgated by a long stream of motorists, but I don't feel I can say they're necessarily safer - the devil is in the detail and sadly most UK authorities still stuff up junction details most of the time, including TfL on some CS2 junctions - I think if you search @subaqua's posting history, you'll see painful examples
And was that stretch built to the current London Cycle Design Standards? Rubbish sightlines and loads of give-ways sounds like a relic from the past, but while councils aren't compelled to follow one of the better design manuals or standards, there's probably some toxic councils still building them... but bad councils build new roundabouts that are extremely hazardous for cycling too and we don't go overboard and start ranting about how that justifies avoiding all carriageways.
