Ampere Way Updates

For well over a year, a cycle lane in Ampere Way, Croydon was full with plastic jersey barriers. Preventing use of the cycle lane. A few weeks ago there was an update to the cycle lane along Ampere Way.

It used to be like this.

It is now like this.

At least the cycle lane is now usable but the additional bollards now mean that the width of the cycle lane has decreased, road sweepers can not clean them and moving in and out of the cycle lane is difficult.

The bollards have been placed on the left side of the painted lane boundary line, reducing the width that was once there. As we can see from the image below, the road is plenty wide enough for the cycle lane to have been increased in width considerably and still allow for motorised forms of transport to pass smoothly.


10 thoughts on “Ampere Way Updates

  1. I’d say it has gone from bad to worse. In Norway it would even be illegal to choose the bike lane at the beginning of the stretch with bollards, since the lane direction sign also applies to bicycles. (at 0:36 in the second video.)

  2. Given the total space for cycle lanes on both side of the road, there was enough space to do a full 3m wide segregated cycle path on one side of the road; wide enough for cycle path sweeper vans to cover, safe to use and possibly popular enough not to get overgrown. Now that money has been spent on plastic reflectors, you won’t see that.

  3. Bloody morons. Also: if (!) bollards were the answer, why so many? Does the contractor in charge of Bollard Services play golf with the roads manager?

  4. Oh.. I stopped the video on the first one at 0:37 and never saw the plastic jersey barriers. The bollards is better, but still a bad solution. There seems to be enough space to make a proper bike lane at 1.5m width and still have room for the bollards between the bike lane and the road

  5. I agree with previous comments that say the bicycle-path could readily be bi-directional and 3m wide. Elzapp wrote that a proper bike-Lane is 1.5m wide. I strongly disagree with this. A bike-Lane is not 75cm wide per direction. If biking is to be subjectively considered “safe” then a wide Lane is one of the more important steps.

    Thanks for the videos!

    1. A proper bike *lane* is (at least) 1.5 metres. A Bi-directional bicycle-path has ofcourse two lanes.

      In my experience single direction lanes on each side of the road connects better with the rest of the road network. But it requres the same amount of space as a 3m wide bicycle-path.

      1. Apologies, I totally misunderstood your post. I believed you meant that the entire bike-facilities should be 1.5m. And I agree with your statement that lanes on either side are better suited to move in/out of any side roads.

  6. I pass this every morning (going in the opposite direction). I’ve never seen anyone else cycle along there. In principle, it would be a good thing, In practice, it’s crap – too narrow and on a road that doesn’t really connect with any well-designed cycle routes – a waste of resources that could have been used more effectively elsewhere.

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