A Pub In His Path

When I was young and thought myself invincible, I would depart for a ride with a full water bottle (or CamelBack, in my mountain biking days) and return home with--a full water bottle.  And, no, I hadn't refilled it along the way.  Sometimes people, including "tough guy" riding partners, either wondered how I didn't, or implored me to, take at least a few sips.  In those days, I just didn't get thirsty very often and didn't realize that even when I wasn't, my body still needed water.

Once, on a ride in Pennsylvania, one of those riding buddies quipped, "This road could be blocked by a fountain and you wouldn't take a drink!"

Perhaps that was true.  But what if the bike lane were blocked by a cafe--or a pub?

A few months into the pandemic, New York City allowed restaurant and bar owners to construct kiosks outside their establishments in order to limit crowding inside.  Some of those kiosks block bike lanes which, ironically, were built not long before the kiosks.  Sometimes I wonder whether those places are trying to drum up business with folks like me--or whether their owners and patrons simply hate us.

The bike lanes in question were all carved out of city streets.  There are a few off-road lanes in the city's parks and other areas.  A few offer snack, drink and lunch stands along the way but none, to my knowledge, feature a full-on restaurant, cafe, bar--or pub.  On the other hand, in at least one part of England, the off-road bike lanes aren't immune to encroachment by eating and drinking establishments. 

Roadcc reader "IanMK" encountered this during his Easter Sunday ride in Buckinghamshire.  He grumbled but, in the end, he stopped for a pint.  I mean, what else could he do, right? 

Paint Is Not Infrastructure

 I don't know whether Robert "Bicycle Bob" Silverman, about whom I wrote yesterday, uttered the title of this post.  It's not hard to imagine that he did--le peinture n'est pas une infrastructure--when he was campaigning for the safe, practical lanes Montreal's cyclists enjoy.

Someone who did say that--in English--was a fellow identified only as "John" in Hertfordshire.  He documented a "near miss" in which a driver squeezed him over to the curb.  

"John" blames, in part the driver:  "Whilst this was telegraphed right from the point when the van signals to turn right, there was a weary inevitability of at least one of the drivers not being able to see beyond the end of their bonnet and creating an easily preventable situation"  

While the carelessness or cluelessness of drivers is not news to cyclists in the UK or US, "John" also blames what an editor of road.cc sarcastically calls "a great piece of cycle superhighway."  His all-too-close encounter, he says, "demonstrates that poor cycle infrastructure, in this case a narrow lane that disappears just when you need it, can cause more problems than it solves."

He said what I've said--and, what I don't doubt "Bicycle Bob" said:  Poorly-conceived, -constructed and -maintained bicycle infrastructure is not only less convenient, but more dangerous, for cyclists and motorists alike, than no infrastructure at all.  I have seen too many examples of that here in New York, but too many planners persist in believing that simply painting a few lines on a street will lead to a safer co-existence, or at least a truce, between cyclists and motorists.