Infrastructure

When I hear that new cycling lanes will be created on a new segment of road I feel excitement, at the prospect of cycling being a pleasant, streamlined experience. Often though, in Switzerland, especially in the French speaking part they will spend months digging up a road, and then putting the road back down, and painting lines and saying “There, we have cycling infrastructure.

They don’t widen the road, and they add the bare minimum. On the most dangerous bit of road they leave it as it is. Those lines were just to tick a box, not to provide cyclists with a better experience. In this case I’m thinking of the road between Crans and Eysins.

In the last two days I have had dangerous situations in Geneva and Nyon when pedestrians, or cars, have failed to pay attention to the fact that they were crossing a cycling lane where cyclists have priority. The result is that in two cases I had to take emergency evasive action to avoid a collision.

For a long time I always unclipped when I thought people might cut me off. Recently I haven’t. The result is that in Geneva, when girls cut me off while I was on a cycle lane with a green light I couldn’t stop, but I didn’t want to hit them. I emergency braked, passed behind them and continued on my way.

I just spent over an hour driving between Morges and Nyon because someone crashed his car, and everyone else is rushing home, or away because the holidays are beginning. I bring this up because the friends of Global Warming want to expand the A1 between Nyon and Geneva, to allow for fluid traffic.

The traffic jam I encountered is between Morges and Nyon so to expand between Geneva and Nyon would do nothing to alleviate this problem. There was a time, when I was younger, and more optimistic, when I loved the idea of the motorway being expanded, but now I think it’s too late. It should have been done two or three decades ago. If it is done in six years it will create awful traffic jams for 10-20 years, and by the time it’s ready for use traffic will have doubled again.