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The cycle lanes are narrower than a road lane, and sometimes two-way, or shared use with pedestrian, and so on. The now-popularised cycling activity means these cycle lanes may/will reach beyond their capacity.
Perfect example is the tiny cycle path that go between the bus stop and the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant and Castle (on Newington Butts, not open yet)
It's not just tiny, but the pavements for pedestrian is also equally tiny, so there's going to be bottlenecks with thousands of cyclists who choose to venture onto the single lane cycle path just to get ahead.
Wait till the summer get here and a lots of those new cycle lanes will suddenly be too small.
edscoble
On that note, while I'm sat here on my high horse eating digestives... what about this:
Currently, many roads are wide enough for motor vehicles and cycles, and studies elsewhere show shared use is safer once cycle numbers increase (ie, 10 cyclists are harder to kill than a single one or something).
Cycle lanes are narrow, and logic is thrown out of the window regarding above shared use etc. Apparently if cycle lanes popularise cycling, then there are more cyclists.
Now, say we all try to avoid the road rage, and we all make use of the cycle lanes at an adequate/safe speed (pootle).
The cycle lanes are narrower than a road lane, and sometimes two-way, or shared use with pedestrian, and so on. The now-popularised cycling activity means these cycle lanes may/will reach beyond their capacity.
What happens then? Because unlike a road where the pootlers can be overtaken, you have pootlers, wobblers, mamils, skidders all crammed into a space much smaller than a road lane...
Even when you take out the mamils, skidders and speedy folk, you will have a mass of wobbly cyclists in a very narrow space. Is it totally unrealistic to expect that actually the low-speed cyclist accidents/collisions will increase? Because that's exactly how it seems every time I go through Hyde Park and nearly get totalled by a tourist on a Boris.