Cycle paths adjacent to A4 Great West Road, not on the carriageway, hardly used. Lycra clad fraternity don't use them but put themselves in conflict with 3 lanes of heavy traffic. And don't complain about debris and carp on them. That was in the old days when cyclists had no say in road design, not now. What more do you want. There is just the same near the kerbside. Its been put in a great expense, nicely coloured so you know where it is, cleaned regularly and patrolled by traffic wardens as it is a red route. So you can't have it all your own way. It's there to be used for the intended purpose. Use it or possibly become a statistic.
As a cyclist (though not as much as I would like - see the problems next) as well as a motorist, I can sympathise with some who don't use cycle lanes and use the roads.
Quite often cycle lanes are strewn with debris and are not cleaned at all (to be honest, most roads aren't these days due to councils cutting such services), which, like on roads, leads to punctures and the occasional blow-out (I had one whilst cycling along the cycle path next to the A1(M) and bearly avoided doing myself serious harm). I'm sure all us drivers can appreciate this, given the current state of the roads, which in areas where there are no cycle lanes (or patchy coverage) and cyclists often have to suddenly swerve from the kerb to avoid debris, potholes and sunken drain covers.
Many areas, including my home town of Royston, are poorly served by cycle lanes - they often (even when there's room to put them at the side of the road, sharing a wide pavement) are squeezed in to ordinary roads (making the road narrower) and often suddenly stop for long distances for no reason, making it impossible to go from A to B without going on busy (and often dangerous) roads. Every road out of town to neighbouring areas are dangerous, and two are notorious accident blackspots for cars and motorbikes, let alone cycles.
If I wanted to cycle to the next town (in any direction), I would mostly have to take my life in my own hands (many trunk roads with fast-moving lorries and cars) or in one or two cases travel 2-3 times the distance you would in a car to keep on the country lanes, which aren't exactly safe themselves, as people use them as cut throughs to villages.
Many towns and cities are like this - councils spending huge amounts of monies on several 200m cycles lanes (and expensive signage/road painting) to nowhere (they never ask the cyclists what they want or take heed when they do), rather than build up co-ordinated routes so cyclists can come off dangerous roads. My council built a tunnel under the railway line to shave off 10 minutes for kids to walk to school (it also included a cycle path, which is bearly used), but didn't make the overall route any safer, as they didn't have to cross any less roads to get to school. It cost, as far as I could recall, £5m of our money and lottery grants.
Outside of kids using it to walk to school (those that don't get a lift from parents), its mostly used as a "hang-out" for feckless youths (with the litter and graffiti that goes with it) and now has to have a CCTV camera pointing at it at the rate-payers' expense. Councils never learn.
Anyhoo - basically more cyclists generally but with poorly-maintained, fragmented cycle lanes + more and larger, faster vehicles = more cyclists on normal roads -> more accidents.
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