First, a lovely shot of a woman with a child on the back, heading straight for another woman on a bike, who is shouting "Sorry! No brakes", as they have a near head-on collision.
Looking the other way, here is a bike going with the traffic and hitting the pedestrian/bike shared zone at full "road" speed. There are some pedestrians in the roadward part of this, so the bike is having to swerve round them. If they had been a few metres further along, more emergency measures would be needed.
Here is the exit of the bridge looking northward. By only parking in half the ASL, the taxi is providing room for bikes, but that is irrelevant, because the southbound bike is actually in this lane heading towards us. If I'd been heading north at speed without lights, I would have hit them at the narrow point.
And here is a bike cutting across the oncoming traffic before banking hard to get into the bike lane. Luckily the Focus isn't hitting the cobbles that hard, and there is nobody coming on the bike section.
No, it isn't too early to say "told you so", only that it is fairly chaotic. Vaguely reminiscent of a level crossing in india -it will be great to see what happens on a bridge swing.
- The entry and exit needs to be wider, so that 2 lanes of bike traffic and/or pedestrians can be accommodated
- people need to get used to it.
It looks like a fair few cyclists are swinging into the cycle path for the southbound stretch, trading off two road crossings for a time saving. To minimise danger on the road crossings they are going sooner rather than later, so the bike lane has become a contraflow. The narrow entry points/exit points create problems for bikes; conflict with pedestrians will happen in the middle.
Victory over Eastasia will soon be ours! Your chocolate ration has been increased to 35g/week to celebrate!