07-13-2016, 04:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-13-2016, 04:39 PM by danbrotherston.)
(07-13-2016, 04:10 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: ...
By the way, in many jurisdictions cyclists are sent to the sidewalk on bridges, since bridges tend to have narrower lanes.
Or at least are much more expensive to widen for bike lanes. The cheap option is to merge with the sidewalk (or otherwise narrow the bike lane) for a small segment while still keeping it separate from cars, which I actually find reasonable, pedestrians/cyclists are *more* able to deal with a constriction point than cars. That being said, the frequency of these constructions very very quickly results in a drop in quality of the infrastructure.
An interesting note, this is also an issue in the Netherlands, many of their bridges are older and also haven't been widened when bike infrastructure was added. There were several ways I saw it dealt with:
Once, we (cyclists) were directed to merge with traffic to move over the bridge, this was the most intimidating moment of cycling in the Netherlands, but still, probably less uncomfortable than the average bike lane ending here. There were no sidewalks on this bridge (pedestrians, in theory would also walk in the traffic lanes)
Several times we merged with the sidewalk, as suggested here, and faced a relative choke point, this was a pretty low traffic area for pedestrians though.
We cycled over this bridge: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/...therlands/ Which had the vehicle portion narrowed (and successfully kept narrow) by 33% to make room for full bike lanes. It is a very busy cycle route today. Worth noting about this instance is the LRT/Tram is forced to "merge" with traffic in this instance, outside the bridge, there are two lanes and a ROW for a tram in each direction, on the bridge there is only two motor vehicle lanes, so the trams are merged into the middle lanes. I imagine they have some signal priority. https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/...therlands/
Fourth and most shocking example, was where a new cycle path had been built along a road with a two lane bridge. The bridge was converted into one lane with traffic signals co-ordinating alternating directions of traffic, while the cycle lane enjoyed free flowing traffic over the other lane. This was not even a busy cycle route (at least at the time we were on it) nor in a built up area.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.7950233,5...312!8i6656
We saw another example of this, but somewhat less shocking:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@52.7694605,5...312!8i6656
Generally though, bridges are a constriction point, using sidewalks are probably fine on bridge.
Other constriction points like town centres, not so much though, because often they are also busy with pedestrian traffic.