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  • Has anyone spotted the danger presented to cyclists by the new cycle lane routing on the A1 north of Archway in N London?

    The route starts with a segregated cycle lane running uphill and parallel with the A1 6 lane dual carriageway. All tickety boo. But.....

    Halfway up the hill the segregated cycle lane ends and joins the bus lane just short of a bus stop. If a bus HAS stopped then the options are:

    Stop behind the bus and wait for it to move; sometimes busses stand here for a few minutes or...

    Overtake the stationary bus which means you're in the middle lane of the 3 lane northbound A1 with all the arse nipping joy of a slow uphill with speeding traffic racing out of London behind you.

    The cfb planner who came up with this isn't a cyclist. He's a sadist.

  • It was redesigned and rebuilt under the dangerous junctions scheme by Boris. Like Oval it suffers from being a piecemeal approach. The road running up the hill isn't a junction and was therefore outside of the designers remit. I would also say there is a flaw in the philosophy of peninsularisation, where one arm of the gyratory is closed, cf. E&C. It adds a ton of complexity to the junction design and without the political will to provide time as well as space through the junction it's a mixed bag for segregated cycling.

    The obvious and tried solution is a bus stop bypass as you have on Blackfriars and elsewhere. Sadiq has been thoroughly underwhelming so far in producing infrastructure so don't expect any changes soon.

  • The segregated cycle lane in the borough of Islington spits the poor person on a bike out onto the A1 metres away from Islington's boundary with Borough of Haringey.

    The local authorities are not the highway authorities for the A1 here, that's TfL (look for red lines/Red Routes). While the boroughs will have had some input, most of the responsibility for the scheme lies with TfL.

  • there is a flaw in the philosophy of peninsularisation

    As with every design choice, peninsularisation is good for some uses, and entirely wrong for others. It started to become a 'thing' when it was considered for Highbury & Islington (with requisite bus operation outside the station), many moons ago (not too long after a different Islington administration rigged the consultation on Newington Green, where a similar scheme was one of the options that they didn't want). There it makes sense, as there's something worth preserving in the centre of the junction (although, paradoxically, it has partly become this because of the current difficulty of access).

    At Archway, too, as there was no way of routing the A1 through the old town centre again and the small cluster of buildings there shouldn't be knocked down, it's the only possibility--although it is admittedly a bit of a hodge-podge, it's still a great victory for the dedicated band of campaigners who brought it about.

    As you say, peninsularisation doesn't work at E&C, which is an utterly disastrous scheme in every respect, a huge waste of public money and a textbook example of how not to treat a site with the potential to be a major town centre (which it has had for a very long time) rather than a major transport interchange, a non-place on the way to somewhere else.

    The worst threat posed by peninsularisation is actually at the Old Street/City Road junction, where a horrific proposal to construct a major tower block in the centre of the junction would destroy any potential for a decent streetscape, and where peninsularisation is basically meant to be used to maintain excessive peak hour motor vehicle flows along the Inner Ring Road alignment. We're told that without this 'London would grind to a halt'--er, no, it wouldn't. I hope this one can be stopped somehow, but I doubt it. Most of the deals seem to have been made under Boris Johnson, although I'm not up-to-date on it.

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