This has annoyed me for a while, and is just another little thing that makes a mockery of the council claim to make Edinburgh a 'Model Cycling City'.
The cut through past Old Registers House from Randolph Place to Charlotte Square is useful. So useful in fact that it's part of Sustrans NCN1.
Now let's just forget for a moment that on the Charlotte Square side there's no dropped kerb, and on the Randolph Place side there's a dropped kerb onto a manhole cover and the most uneven and gappy cobbles in the city. Forget that poor aspect of the cycling infrastructure.
When the tram works began and buses were divered onto Charlotte Square (the surface of which was never obviously intended for that heavy traffic, it's shifted so much in the last couple of years) a temporary bus stop was put in. So temporary it's still there, and marked on GoogleMaps. And where do they put it? Right in the way of the entrance and exit to this lane.
Heading west to east it's not tooooo bad because the stop ends just to the left of the exit, although it completely obscures traffic travelling around the square when a bus is stopped. But going east to west, as I did this morning, if you have two buses there it's a right royal pain in the proverbial. The buses completely block off access and you're left with a choice between the typical 'cyclists dismount' scenario, or riding along the pavement for 10 yards suffering the glowers of those walking along the pavement (or disgorging from the bus).
Just a legal technical point, to gain access to a route on which you are legally allowed to cycle you are allowed to cycle on the pavement where normally you wouldn't - I've stretched this rule so that if a bus is (as is the norm) blocking the normal access, I can adopt an alternative access.
So just what could the council have done to maintain the aura of this grand move towards a cycling culture to rival Copenhagen and Amsterdam? Well on the south side of Old Registers House there is an identical alleyway, on which cycles are not allowed, which offers two solutions.
1. Change the cycle route to the other side, one benefit being that those travelling west to east do not have the view of the road obscured on coming out; or
2. Have the bus stop blocking access to THAT alleyway instead.
The current situation doesn't show malice towards cyclists, but just shows that any time ANY councillor says that they want the city to be a 'Model Cycling City' they are, and I'm afraid this is true, lying. If they were telling the truth the council would have a dedicated team of more than one chap fielding enquiries and coming up with ideas, and utterly idiotic things like this simply would NOT be put in place.
The Danes and the Dutch would be laughing their socks off.
posts
