Our local council has been splurging more money on widening the foot/bike path around The Bay, which is a nice way to spend my rates. I won't be objecting to that, since it helps to keep me away from cars, and anything that keeps me away from cars is nice.
It would be good if it also kept me away from dogs not on leashes, prams not in their lane and family groups of 10 or more that take up the entire path from edge to edge, and are oblivious to anyone else that wants to use the path. Family groups also seem to walk at the speed of crawling babies, even if there are no crawling babies in the group, so even people that are walking find them to be a complete pain in the arse.
But enough of that. For the last few months, one lane of the roadway has been blocked off for a few hundred yards whilst the path is widened a few metres. There's been big chainlink fences and road barriers and all sorts of stuff erected to keep cars and people off the new path and separated from each other. Whilst that was going on, a bit of tar was laid as a ramp from the road to the existing path so that cyclists like me could get over the curb without putting an enormous ding in our front wheel.
Not long ago, the concrete trucks turned up and a hundred metres or so of new path was laid. For some reason they didn't finish the job, so there are a hundred metres or more of beautiful new path, and a few hundred metres of blue metal which is impossible to ride over with a road bike. Mountain bikes are ok, but I am not.
This means I have to stay on the road to skirt the pathworks, which I don't mind, except that someone has taken away the little tar-ramp at the end, so instead of just skirting a hundred or so metres of pathworks, I have to stay on the road for about a kilometre before another ramp appears and I can zip back onto the bike path. And of course there is no longer a bike lane, so you are stuck on the road with all the other numbnuts. The speed limit around the Bay is 50, but that doesn't stop young fools in a bright yellow WRX with an exhaust the size of a bin lid from trying to do 100. And although there are double white lines all the way around, and I ride very aggressively well out from the kerb, it doesn't stop them from trying to overtake on blind corners. One had a near head-on just as he overtook me last week - dickhead. The thing I worry about is that I will pile into the crash from behind, or the dickhead will swerve hard left to avoid the oncoming car and squish me into the cars parked on my left.
So good on you Council - another good effort marred by a brain dead engineer who failed to think about who is using the path. The trouble with most of them seems to be that they are all trained in road works - ie, how to deal with cars, and they have no idea about how to deal with non-vehicular flows; dogs, prams, pedestrians, bikes. They're just so one eyed.
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