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Jeremy Parker · January 8th 04, 01:55 PM posted to uk.transport.london

"Helen Deborah Vecht" wrote in message
...
"Jeremy Parker" typed

The most controversial junction "improvement" being researched
was
the idea of putting bike lanes round the edge of roundabouts.
That's
an obvious (to me) killer. If you are ever riding a bike round a
roundabout, stay as far away from the bike lanes as possible.

Jeremy Parker

There is a dreadful example of this in Burnt Oak barely 1/4 mile
from
the traffic lights at the othe end of Orange Hill Road :-(

--
Helen D. Vecht:
Edgware.

Ah yes. Bad as Barnet's bike laned roundabouts are, they used to be
even worse. There used to be a "give way" sign painted on the bike
lanes at each entering road. Thus a cyclist in the bike lane had to
give way, but by moving a few inches to the right, out of the bike
lane, the cyclist regained the normal right of way of all the other
traffic.

I mocked these roundabouts at one of the monthly meetings of the
Barnet Cyclists Campaign, which was attended by one of Barnet's
traffic bureaucrats. A few weeks later all the give way signs
mysteriously vanished. However, on the Orange Hill/Deansbrook
roundabout, that Helen refers to, something went wrong with the
unpainting, leaving the right of way rules highly confused. It's
been like that for several years now.

Barnet council's cabinet member for transport, the ultimate Mr Toad,
seems, alas, to be going back on his promise to remove all Barnet's
bike lanes. There was a small section of bike lane removed from
Finchley High Road which did get removed. The lane was no loss, but
I did feel that the Barnet Cycling Campaign should have been notified
when it vanished.

It turns out that no notification was needed. Apparently what looked
like a bike lane was not a bike lane at all. The lane had been
installed under an experimental authorisation. Such things are only
temporary - I think they last for six months. Nothing was done,
though, to remove the paint at the end of the experimental period.

What this implies about the legal situation when the paint was still
there, I don't know. What the status is of Barnet's other lanes, I
don't know. Whether something similar has happened elsewhere, I
don't know.

If you look at p75 of the highway Code, you will see that the
triangular road sign with a picture of a bike on it is not a warning
of possible bikes - you might get bikes on any road, and at the
warning signs there are rarely any more bikes than anywhere else.
Instead the sign is, legally, a warning of bike facilities. Given
that all bike faciliities in Britain are designed by idiots, such a
warning is an excellent idea.

Jeremy Parker

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