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As the bin man suggests, if they block the road they still have to drag the bins across the cycleway, therefore still creating a hazard for cyclists.
Also, in blocking the road zero cars will be able to safely navigate the bin truck. A car pulling into the cycle lane would be both illegal and dangerous. I bet some would still try it, and therefore create a more significant hazard to cyclists. However, by blocking the cycle lane, a cyclist should be able to safely navigate past the truck either by waiting for a gap in the traffic or pushing their bike down the pavement. Neither of these are difficult.
As a result, if you compare the two options for the bin men, i think you can reasonably argue they've chosen the best one and the safest for them. Clearly its not ideal, but this is a big, busy, crowded city, and sometimes you've just got to deal with mild inconvenience in a calm and safe manner.
Scrabble-
What Scrabble said. The driver of the waste lorry is absolutely the last person anyone should blame. Obviously, it's usually the people on the frontline/on the street who get it in the neck. The whole situation is one of the many undesirable symptoms of Camden's failure (over getting on for decades) to filter this whole area.
Where they/TfL have filtered, as in the lamentable fairly recent scheme at the junction of the A501 Euston Road, Midland Road, and Judd Street, they've filtered at the main street junction with a side street instead of inside the traffic cell to be filtered, which is one of the worst things you can do. Obviously, the intention is to increase motor traffic capacity for the major flows along the A501 and out of Midland Road, which in turn is a one-way street for the same reason. In the area south of there, there is still a major rat-running alignment open, i.e. from Gower Street to Gray's Inn Road, and that's why you still get high flows west-east.
The whole area is a perfect demonstration of how not to approach modal filtering, with many partial legacy schemes, e.g. around Regent Square, filtering previously dominant rat-runs, thereby pushing the flows on to other alignments which then likewise get partially filtered. Even were that main remaining alignment filtered, it would make driving around the area very indirect, maintaining an atmosphere of quasi-through motor traffic, i.e. people driving fast in the area because they have so far to go to get to where they want to go. The inflexible design where this incident occurred is just a very minor symptom of this systematic failure.
Oliver Schick
Exactly that. It's completely fucking unacceptable, since when is it OK to drive in oncoming traffic and on top of that just stop whenever you feel like it? Fucking stay on the road and stop there, at least they'd be pointing the right direction. Oh but then it'd inconvenience car drivers, eh?