please empty your brain below

Complex as these works must be, as a nation we seem to make a horrendous mess of many such infrastructure projects. There often appears to be little or no regard for the impact on existing users throughout the (routinely extended) construction phases.
building a proper segregated cycleway takes time.

how else do you suggest facilities for cyclists are improved quickly?

you cant just paint a line on the ground as vehicles drive in them and park in them!

i'm afraid you're just going to have to be patient

i think you are a bit biased and you are "anti-cycling"
And, Oh dear, the end of the financial year is approaching. We haven't managed to spend the budget. Let's order a lorry-load of paper clips, printers and other consumables that might be useful.

Or, if this was the MOD, let's tarmac the disused Parade Ground again.

Cynical, moi? Never !
Frank F. Surely you're only partly right. Some projects seem to run OK. I'm particularly impressed by what's going on at London Bridge (station). Imagine trying to run a project like that. I can't even get a plumber to quote for a relatively simple job.

There's a whole list of infrastructure projects recently that have completed successfully such as CTRL, T5, KX, but there's also others that seem less successful such as Great Western electrification and Edinburgh light rail.

dg's right on this one though. It looks a right mess. Maybe it'll be lovely when it's finished.
Walking along Victoria Embankment the other day I saw a similar thing. The cycle lane is there, but inaccessible from the eastern end. It's well used by cyclists in the rush hour though, they just have to do a slightly awkward manoeuvre of stopping on the edge of the road and lugging their bikes over the divider.

Every few hundred meters along there, there's a sign saying "cycle path closed", but nothing that actually blocks you from using it.
DG is patently not anti-cyclist. He is anti-incompetence and anti-unnecessary-inconvenience. And indeed anti-putting-cyclists-in-danger-for-months-while-trying-to-make-them-safer.

What it comes down to is (a lack of) effective project management. The saga with the bus stop is an example of where this is going wrong.
I have never tried to project manage anything more complex than setting up tables for a village fete. (That was nightmare enough). But there are examples around of good project management, so it ought to be possible to do it better than this.

As for the person up there who claimed that DG is anti-cyclist, I wonder if he even read the article. DG makes it very clear, repeatedly, that cyclists are among those whose lives are being put at risk by this incompetence - if that's what it is.

I agree that it should be great when it's finished.
Once it's finished it will no doubt be fabulous for cyclists. And then within a fortnight a utility company will be digging up a section of it.
I would be interesting, if you walk the route again once its been fully open for a while, to see if the number of cyclists increases, because 6 cyclists a mile sounds pretty pathetic for the amount of upheaval it's caused!
This sort of dis-jointed work is as a result of modern project management practices. The finished-but-not-open sections are probably waiting for a H&S inspector to ensure they meet the safety requirements. Rather than having said person on the books throughout the project, the project management will have a block of safety checking at the end of the project, so over the space of a couple of days, all those sections will get inspected and opened.

You would think it would be easier to do a small section and then move onto the next section, rather than doing the whole thing over a long period of time, but doing it in sections costs more because you have disjointed blocks of work rather than a single solid block. So we end up with long worksites with little going on most of the time, in the name of cost management. Of course, if the cost of disruption was included, the plans would turn out a lot differently.
It is strange that the work on CS6 seems to be going so much better. It is already complete and in use up to and slightly beyond Southwark station, and although from there to Blackfriars station is currently a mecca for cone enthusiasts there is visible progress from day to day - they were surfacing and line painting on the bridge on Wednesday so it can't be long now until it is ready.

That said, the closure of the slip road onto the Embankment at Blackfriars has led to more traffic in the area as some of the diversion routes are quite lengthy (via Westminster Bridge!) and the phasing of the temporary lights at the junction is not as clever as the permanent set up was, and hopefully will be again when it is all over.

(Never mind six per mile, there are often too many of us to fit in the cycle box at the lights)
@Jimbo
"The finished-but-not-open sections are probably waiting for a H&S inspector to ensure they meet the safety requirements."
Nothing new about that - the head on train collision near Norwich in 1874 occurred on a line which had recently been double-tracked, but the second track had not yet been signed off by the Railways Inspectorate so it was still operating as a single track railway.
DG, you should take a walk along the construction of the north-south CS near Blackfriars. The process is quite similar in nature.
@greg
But seemingly everything being done on one length and then moving on to the next. I rarely venture south of Stamford Street but every time I do another section of the route is complete - it is now continuous to just north of Southwark station and, as I said above, the section across Blackfriars Bridge looks almost ready. New Bridge Street and Farringdon Street are currently a mess, I agree, but it only started relatively recently (January, I think). Beyond Holborn Viaduct there was little no evidence of any work having started yet last time I was there, last month.
TfL: If it ain't broke keep fixing it till it is :(
Meanwhile, across SE London, numerous sets of traffic lights are being overhauled - all pretty much at the same time - presumably in some sort of effort to make them "safer." It'd be better if they finished a few before starting on another lot. It's been going on for weeks, presumably also prompted by the approaching financial year-end.
In the case of LB Lewisham it's hard to tell where they're finding the money given they don't even seem able to pay someone to pass a sponge over the reflective bollards along Evelyn St :(
To be fair, as someone who lives just off Fairfield Road, there's a significant amount of cycle traffic in this direction. The main movements being from Fairfield Road into Bow Road westbound, and the reverse. Despite it being a banned turn traditionally that's never stopped cyclists doing it anyway...
@Petras409
Central government has been using accrual-based accounting since the early 2000s which has largely nullified the end-of-year splurges that occurred under the previous cash accounting. I assume local authorities use accrual-based accounting too these days, given the adoption of IPSAS.

@Andrew
Whilst I have criticised DG for being anti-cyclist in the past, he seems to be quite fair in his most recent posts. As others have said, this post is about project management and not about cyclists per se.
It's the old 80/20 rule. The first 80% of the project uses 80% of the time available, and the last 20% takes the other 80%.
Peter CS - I love that. First time I have heard it.
@Timbo - the reason you've seen no work on the North-South route past Holborn Viaduct is that none is currently planned. The route will end rather abruptly at Stonecutter Street until agreement can be reached on the best path to take to King's Cross.

The North-South route is due to be finished in April. A month or so ago I'd have not believed it possible, but there's been a lot of progress lately. As DG rightly points out though it's the snagging that seems to drag these things beyond the deadline.

One thought is how effectively these new, two-way segregated routes will work at certain pinch points. For example, before works commenced I found that in the mornings the phasing of the lights northbound at the junction with Victoria Embankment caused a large group of cyclists to build up whilst waiting on a red. This is of course even worse with construction under way restricting the space for bikes to gather in. I know the left turn for drivers will be a thing of the past, but when the large groups of cyclists arrive (presumably in greater number than before, as more will be encouraged onto the route thanks to the increased safety segregation brings) there's a good chance they will spread out and block the southbound side of the superhighway whilst waiting for the lights. I hope I've explained that properly. I think there are a few points on the new improved superhighways where this could be an issue.
@matt
We shall see. At present most of the cyclists want to crowd forward into the cycle box to get out of the killing zone to the left of the queuing traffic behind - although there's usually one who insists on sitting in the left side of the box and stoppers up the exit from the killing zone for any cyclists arriving afterwards*. In future, the theory is that presumably they will line up in an orderly queue at the cycle lights. we'll see!

*We also had, at the junction of Stamford Street, cyclists sitting in the left side of the cycle box wishing to go straight ahead, oblivious to the left turn only markings and then outraged when hooted at by traffic getting the left-turn filter.










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