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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

One of the issues raised about transport on Wightman Road is the safety of the "islands":

The islands make it safer for pedestrians to cross and are supposed to slow down motor vehicles, but they feel very unsafe for cyclists who can get squeezed into the kerb by inconsiderate drivers.

I noticed this road design near Arsenal tube recently:

This seems to retains the safety for pedestrians (the width of road they have to cross is the same as with the islands), but makes it much safe for cyclists too - they have a segregated mini-lane. It would also be much more effective at slowing down motor vehicles - in fact would probably need some sort of "give-way to oncoming traffic" arrangement to ensure which lane knows it should stop.

Here's another example from Hornsey Lane (B540):

(All photos from google streetview)

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Yeah, I realised this on my cycle this morning!

Correct, those are rainwater gullies behind the traffic islands, not cycle bypasses.

I didn't realise that - the one on the right of Gillespie definitely looks likes a gully, the one on the left would work reasonably well as a cycle bypass though? The concept is a bit like the floating bus stop, which can work well when properly designed.

The cyclists that I see are a law onto themselves I assumed that pavements were for pedestrians not for cyclists to cycle on.

The drivers that I see are all on their cellphones. Do we really need to descend into this again? The last acceptable form of racism may be that against travellers but the dominant wish of the population seems to be that cyclists should at the very least be maimed in some way by a motor vehicle.

  • The vast majority of vehicle-related pedestrian injuries on the footway/verge involve a motor vehicle, not a cycle: from 2005-14 (GB), 98.5% of pedestrian fatalities and 95.7% of pedestrian serious injuries that happened in collisions on a footway/verge involved a motor vehicle.

The reason that fatalities and serious injuries are greater for cars is because cars are bigger and heavier than bikes, it's not because of the number of collisions.  In my lifetime, I've never been hit by a car as a pedestrian but have had five collisions with bicycles, none of which would appear in any statistics because they were neither serious nor fatal.  It doesn't mean I wasn't shaken though.

That may or may not be true in terms of number of collisions. However, I'd prefer the focus to be on the serious injury and deaths rather than being shaken, this is one of those areas where perception is wildly different to the reality.

I don't agree at all with cycling on the pavement but the focus on it is far out of proportion to the damage it causes.

My reality is I've been hit 5 times by bikes and never by a car.  That is my focus.

It would be better to focus on the severity of collision incidents rather than the likelihood. If you'd been hit 5 times by a car you wouldn't be around to tell us about it.

I've lost count of the times I've been hit by cars on my motorbike. Perhaps 20 times. My point was that you shouldn't dismiss people's views about the way certain cyclists ignore the rules of the road and somehow think that careering the wrong way down one way roads (as happened on 2 of the occasions I was referring to) at 25mph is OK. I've never done anything like that on my bike.

But it is just "certain cyclists" - people only remember the cyclists / or indeed motorists, that behave badly. The majority don't though I'd say (again, both motorists & cyclists), so it a shame arguments always seem descend into "them versus us".

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