A place on the fediverse to share and discuss about commuting by bicycle
My city is full of these Cloverleaf interchanges where cars exiting the freeway are merging into high speed traffic.
So I get to pedal down this road and get sandwiched between buses/trucks on the left and merging cars on the right. Legitimately the worst part of my commute where I might actually die. Fun!
I wish, for once, that city planners used the infrastructure that they built. Maybe then would they realize how silly/dangerous/insane some of these design decisions are.
It's hard to get a new cyclist to use a route like that, which puts someone back in their car.
From one confident pedaler to another: don't go this way. This is bad news and only a matter of time.
Yeah it sucks that the freeway runs right through the middle of the city, it's a whole other trip to find safer roads to cross to the other side. Fortunately the Work-from-Home culture has stuck at my company so I don't have to do this everyday.
Vayacondios
Where I live (New South Wales, Australia) the official way for cyclists to traverse junctions like this is to stop/slow down about where the back of the red car is, do a 90 degree turn to the right and cross the on-ramp - either cycling or walking - perpendicular to the direction of traffic, then get going again down the "far" side of the on-ramp (from the perspective of this image.)
Not perfect because unless there's nothing coming down the ramp at all you still have to slow down/lose momentum if not actually stop, but definitely preferable to becoming a human zipper between two lanes of merging cars travelling three times faster than you are.
That isn't bike infrastructure...that's homicidal government negligence. You should invite a few city councilors or transportation bureaucracts to go for a bike ride with you sometime...I agree with the other commenter who suggested finding another route. Its totally worth the longer ride to miss this death trap
I imagine the road engineers that decide to make this just want to create as many future cyclist deaths as possible.
This is what happens when the city is required to add X miles of bike lanes but they don't really want to, so they throw down some green paint wherever and call it good.
Yikes. That merge cries out for some kind of physical barrier to enforce the bike lane. Does your municipality track cyclist accidents by location? I'd want to know how many people got mowed down there before riding on it.
I don't know per location but my city (San Jose) is infamous for the number of pedestrian and cyclist deaths per year :(