Stevie
[email protected] D wrote: ( If I get to the ASL before the lights go
green, fine and dandy. ) ( If I don't get to the ASL before the lights go green, I will join the )
traffic flow, and while keeping to the left, position myself between ( two cars, so that I am
clearly visible to the driver who is most ) likely to turn across my path at the critical time.
That's the tricky bit: what would you do if the lights change and you are two or three car lengths
from the ASL alongside the front two or three cars of a nose-to-tail stationary stuff? You know that
even if they're turning left they probably aren't indicating until the lights change...
( This is then no
) different a situation to if I had waited with the rest of the queue -
Oh, yes it is. If you'd joined the back of the queue you wouldn't have to work your way into a
moving gap less than a bike's length while the driver behind it is concentrating not on you but on
the lights and the junction ahead of him.
There are a couple of junctions on my commute where I think that the only rational thing to do is to
ignore the lane to the ASL and sit in the queue of cars, even though that can be for a couple of
cycles of the lights. I see other cyclists doing the other thing, and sometimes failing to "join the
traffic flow" until the gap around me comes past them.
My favourite badly constructed junction (no ASL, admittedly) at
<http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=451183&y=207250&z=2&sv=451183,207250&st=4&ar=Y> has a green
kryptonite lane going northwards to it (along Parks Road) which stops about twenty yards short of
the lights (facing onto the A4165 Banbury Road). In that twenty yards the rest of the northbound
road splits into two lanes (one for left, one for right) *and* turns left though a right angle
around a tight corner. To add to the confusion many of those northbound cyclists are expected to
turn right off that road onto a side street (Norham Gardens) on the outside of the tight left hand
bend to follow NCN51 and various local routes.
Since there is often stationary traffic at those lights well back into town there is essentially
nothing rational to do at the point where the green kryptonite ends abruptly, and only by having
been caught before can you know to "join the traffic" at least a hundred yards earlier.
Moreover there is a wide island in the mouth of Parks Road between the two northbound lanes and the
one southbound lane, and "no entry" signs notwithstanding, traffic turning right out of the Banbury
Road when there isn't anyone stationary at the lights on Parks Road often turns short of the island
and then finds itself coming down the wrong side of the road around the tight bend at the end of the
cycle lane.
There are ASLs at this junction on the Banbury Road, but one of the consequences of maintaining a
green kryptonite lanes in both directions on the Banbury Road is that there is not really room at
the junction for two (car) lanes northbound and one southbound, so there has been no room at all
left for traffic signals facing south south of the junction. (In fairness, the suicide railings on
the pavement have been set well back from the kerb to leave room for the handlebars of cycles forced
into the kerb by traffic that doesn't fit into the overly narrow lanes, but that just makes the
pavement too narrow.) That means there have to be signals facing south in the secondary position,
north of the junction; and these are so far from the stop line and the ASL south of the junction
that traffic often runs straight through those lines and stops short of the signals half way though
the junction.
To add to the confusion, there is a bidirectional off-road lane on the other side of Parks Road
(strictly speaking, "in" the University Parks, although outside the railings). This also ends at the
junction of Parks Road and Norham Gardens, but the only designed access between the lane and the
road is south of the junction with Norham Gardens, offering northbound cycles no rational way of
doing anything but turning south again! Of course the consequence is that cycles use the pavements
and drop into the thoroughly confused traffic from random directions.
I've watched this junctions "developing" over the past thirty years, and it's definitely getting
more confusing. The present chaos is a consequence of the decision to use this junction as part of
the innermost east-north route onto which to move most of the traffic displaced from the centre of
Oxford by closing the High Street. And people driving cars into Oxford daily wonder there are
residents who resent their cars in Oxford.