please empty your brain below

I think there is a cyclist on the sidewalk in your second picture (next to reason 3. He is cycling not only on the pavement but against the flow of traffic. Maybe that's the safest route.
They do this sort of thing so well in other countries. Why couldn't tfl have looked to Holland or Germany for some expertise?

The constant waste of money on ineffective (dangerous) cycling provision, however well meaning, is quite dispiriting.
I agree with Dan - why try to re-invent the (bicycle) wheel ?
These cycle superhighways make me laugh, especially when they are described as segregated. I grew up in Stevenage, a deeply unglamorous place, as new towns tend to be. However, it does have one redeeming feature that town planners everywhere should learn from. When the town was designed, a completely separate cycle network was put in place, with major routes running alongside arterial roads and smaller cycle paths snaking off through all the neighbourhoods. If you're on a bike in Stevenage, you can usually reach an entry point to the network within a few hundred yards and after that you can get clear across town without having to worry about anything more than the occasional moped.
So this is where the traffic light tree from Westferry Circus ended up.
What an absolute bloody mess.
Surely, one of the worst things on the road are signs and directions that are (or can appear to be) ambiguous, and lead to people misreading them and making mistakes.
And this is a whole heap of ambiguity... for everyone.
Ye gods, I have a headache just looking at all this. It looks absolutely, completely and utterly bonkers. Expect some kind of sticking glass solution in the form of lots of additional signs to be added under the traffic lights to explain it all.

But this is the madness you get when your priority is maintaining traffic flow, when actually what we should be doing is making traffic flow worse. Otherwise how are we going to get those people out of their cars who don't need to be in them?

Of course no Conservative Mayor would ever do anything like that - would infuriate the 'burbs too much, with whom they are too reliant on for votes. And so many people are wedded to their cars when they don't need to be.

One day we will get politicians who aren't so enthralled by car owners. But somehow I suspect it will be a very long time away.
It's 'new and different and original'? Well yes, except that in the very early days of advanced stop lines, this is how they were supposed to work (not, admittedly with the roundabout nonsense). The very first ASL, in Oxford in 1986, had the two stage traffic light approach - see the 'original design' diagram here. Adding the sign at the bottom of that diagram to the forward traffic lights would add even more to the visual clutter, but at least would be explicit about what is intended.
A far better design, and one that would make crossing the roundabout perfectly safe for both cyclists and pedestrians, would be to have a segregated cycle lane with its own lights and its own light phase. You could then add pedestrian crossings onto this as well. Cycling on the A12 is banned so cyclists are always going to want to simply carry on the A11. Therefore when it's green for motorists, it's red for pedestrians and bikes. Once it's red for motorists it turns green for bikes and pedestrians and everyone can cross the roundabout safely.

However that would disrupt the traffic flow, so will never be implemented under Boris.
We did have a politician who was not in thrall to car owners, and he lost the Mayoral race - twice!
Lewis: I wrote some stuff back in Jan about how to accomplish exactly this without increasing the number of traffic light phases, it's all to do with separation of movement in time http://pedestrianiselondon.tumblr.com/post/15901842253/bow-roundabout
Andrew
Traffic flow in London is slow enough without artifically making it even worse. A lot of the vehicle traffic are delivery drivers, maintenance workers, plumbers, builders etc who can hardly be expected to go by bicycle. And buses of course, which also get affected by poor traffic flows. I've been in buses stuck at traffic lights with ridiculous phasings. Or stuck behind a bicycle going slowly up a hill. As DG stated, 30 buses an hour pass that way

And no, I don't drive to work myself.
Drove through it both ways yesterday. Confused the hell out of me - especially the out-of-sync lights going east onto the roundabout. Would hate to do it as a cyclist!
Perhaps someone could constructively suggest what exactly they would have done differently and post their redesign with full capacity analysis?










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