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Also used the newly-opened bike lanes and hence am considering upgrading to suspension forks. They certainly don't give as much care and attention to surfacing the bike lanes as they do with the roads.
S/B flows quite well and keeps you nicely segregated as it should, but N/B is dire, especially where it spits cyclists out into pulling-in buses, as happened today. I don't know whey they couldn't have routed the bike lane behind the bus stop and filter the traffic turning left into Keyworth St as per Kennington Road CS7 N/B.
Upside; I think it cut 3 mins off my travel.
5/10
Aaaand the E&C cycle lanes are open. First impressions.
1) The northbound section that goes behind the bus stops was okay - but only because of an army of pink hi-vis officials keeping peds off the bike lane. One poor ped got a shock when an official yelled to warn her of my presence - to be honest, I'd clocked her and was going to let her cross. Oh well...
2) There was a fairly long wait to cross St. George's Road, and for much of that wait the crossing was completely blocked by a lorry. It was more luck than good management that he'd moved out the way by the time the lights for the crossing went green.
3) After all that, you don't even get to the other side of E&C before you have to rejoin the main flow of traffic. There's a bike T-junction type thing to rejoin the bus lane looking over your right shoulder.
4) At the end there's a similar problem to northbound at Oval - there's 10m of segregated lane that spits you out into a bus stop. Not ideal.
Overall, it's... okay. It's not seamless, and it's probably faster using the road, but to be honest I don't know how I would design it. It definitely increases the chance of bike-ped collisions in an attempt to reduce motor vehicle-bike collisions.
7/10