Yeah, destroying pedestrian and cycle infrastructure to keep cars out is a pet peeve of mine. It's often dangerous, makes the path inaccessible, and just plain ugly.

Like the "concrete pigs" you mention. Often not marked properly, and cyclists have to slow down to a crawl to pass. Often 90% of the road is blocked with a boom barrier, and pedestrians and cyclists all have to share the remaining part to squeeze through. That only increases conflict. Also pretty hard for bigger cargo bikes, wheelchairs etc to pass. During winter, the booms are opened for the snow plow and then closed. Which means that as a cyclist I still have to cycle around on the un-plowed part...

It's insane the lengths one has to go to avoid cars destroying everything.

Edit: An example pic https://imgur.com/a/FmDd5Ve Nice wide road, have to close it off with a boom because of cars. Pedestrians and cyclists have to pass on the icy parts...

At the end of this article (translated from Swedish) are a whole bunch of deadly obstacles placed in the way of cyclists “for their own safety”: https://bicycling-se.translate.goog/blogg/bilhindren-som-dod...

Yeah, those pictures are quite crazy. I follow him on Twitter and saw the thread asking for examples, I think he got hundreds of images!

worst are the iron chains hanging 30 cms over the ground

Just yesterday I had such a conflict. Someone thought one of these narrow openings was a good be place to stop for dog defacation.

Some drunk mistakes the bike path for their turn and the municipal planner shows up to work on Monday with an inbox that's been blown up by a million Karens screeching about "gotta keep cars out"

So he goes through the catalog of typical off the shelf solutions that exist in his trade, selects a reasonable one and has it installed. 6mo later his inbox gets blown up by the same million Karens screeching about how the barrier made the bike path suck.

A large subset of the public is made up of people that don't understand that everything is tradeoffs and think they can have their cake and eat it too. And because these people can't wrap their minds around the tradeoffs it's impossible to have the adult dialog regarding which tradeoffs they dislike least that needs to be had if the least worst solution is to be reached. There's no winning when dealing with this kind of customer base unless you creatively define "winning" to exclude customer satisfaction. But when you do that you get other failure modes. You can sometimes money your way around the problems but that's just a constant factor improvement on something that's exponentially crap.

Tunnels are also significantly more expensive, which is why they're so rare. With a tunnel, you generally have significant earthworks, possibly a permanent groundwater issue (you may have essentially created a boat that you do not want to float), and you still have to build a bridge capable of carrying whatever traffic the bikes are bypassing. A bicycle bridge is just the bicycle bridge, a relatively light structure, easy to construct and maintain.

Dark underpasses can be avoided by splitting the "bridge" into multiple smaller bridges.

Example of a "6 lane" split into 6 smaller bridges: https://goo.gl/maps/V84SqmbjkASapyxQA

This allows for a lot of light and no overhead lights are needed.

(my gut tells me this design was used to improve maintainability: you cannot completely close the bridge or highway as the city is too dependent. But they could get away with closing 1-of-5 bridges for some time).

Five of the six bridges carry railway lines.

I think the design is more likely because the tracks are very close to a station, so they're spaced widely to allow for the platforms.

The station is very small and cheaply built, so it might have been cheaper to make two tracks on one bridge and then have the "people platform" on each side of the tracks instead of between.

Just like this place: https://goo.gl/maps/gwfGxdxDs4sbpF2S7

Or this with a station on a curve: https://goo.gl/maps/Eo5fZK5E8kYoFAuW8

>Now of course maybe the cyclist shouldn't have been going that fast

Now replace cyclist with motorist.

Would it be in anyway acceptable for someone to plonk an unmarked concrete block in the middle of an unlit road?

That never happens to motorists because the roads are rarely designed by people who don't drive. For cycling, that's not often false than true, unless you consider people who know how to ride a bike because they did it as a child as falling into the "true" bin, or people who never ride outside some vacation resort, and never faster than 10 mph.

Cycling infrastructure designed by people who don't cycle is far too common.

A favourite example I have to deal with often is when the path has to narrow, so they put up signs telling all cyclists to dismount. I pass through a few of these often, and whenever a cyclist obeys the sign it creates immediate congestion because pushing a bike is slow and takes up more space. Then you get a cascade effect of pedestrians stepping into car traffic to avoid the bottleneck.

Another is rumble strips to slow down bikes at pedestrian crossings. It doesn't slow anyone enough to prevent incident, and tends to give pedestrians an illusion of priority so they stop looking for bikes in the path. Not to mention being uncomfortable enough to discourage using the bike path at all, and shaking lights out of position.

> Another is rumble strips to slow down bikes at pedestrian crossings.

Do you by chance mean those things on the ground with the raised dots/grooves? [1]

Those are actually for helping the blind navigate it. If it is something different JUST to slow bikes though... That just makes me go WTF.

[1] https://cdn.w600.comps.canstockphoto.com/man-walking-on-yell...

Probably no.

But there is a guideline that you should only go at the speed from which you can stop from within the visible part of the road.

And yet roads are full of highly visible warning signs whereverr there is a turn that might not be safe at slightly beyond general maximum speed in some weather conditions.

I'm not sure I've seen weather condition specific warning signs, apart from the speed limits being lowered for the winter season by swapping the signs themselves.

Can you link to an example?

They're pretty common in some places. The E17/A22 entering France for example has these overhead signs[0] that go from 110 in good conditions down to 70 in very bad conditions or even 50 if there's congestion. There are also similar signs in Belgium but they're more rarely adjusted depending on weather, it's usually just according to traffic.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/pbCArbN5yraJZFBw9

I can’t seem to find a link, but I know there is a fog-prone Interstate zone in eastern Tennessee (probably I-81, might be I-40) with variable speed limit signs not terribly different from those on UK smart motorways.

Hungary has an elegant, low-tech solution. Broad white stripes are painted ~100 m apart on the shoulder of the road. Fixed signs indicate the allowed speed - if you can see three, it’s 130, two is 110, one is 80 (or something like that - it’s been a few years).

I wasn't even referring to signs that are only applicable in specific weather conditions, just pointing out the absurd amount of handholding drivers tend to get. Some drunk chump might run straight into the trees? Add more reflective chevrons. Someone still crashed? Add flashing LEDs.

And yes, German signage certainly does weather dependency, speed limits with "Zusatzzeichen 1052-36" are quite frequent (I think it's put up everywhere the surface doesn't drain as good as it should, e.g. if surface angle changes slightly from the ground setting after construction)

The UK's "smart motorways" project does this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway

Actually turns out they're a terrible idea, tbh.

> Would it be in anyway acceptable for someone to plonk an unmarked concrete block in the middle of an unlit road?

You mean like the "traffic calming measures" most urban roads have, to slow down cars?

Traffic calming measures, unless implemented entirely incorrectly, are not unmarked. To have them unmarked would defeat the purpose, which is to indicate that the driver of the vehicle attempting to navigate the street must slow down. It is not in the interest of those living on a street with traffic calming measures to have drivers cross the traffic calming measure at a high speed.

Narrow or winding roads, or roads with no central marker are calming techniques often unaccompanied by signage

Okay, but many of those traffic calming measures are a big concrete block in the middle of the road.

Was just about to write something similar, just without the bloody evidence: the "no turns!" part should be right at the start where benefits of inertia-assisted climbing is advertised, because that all turns into the opposite when there are turns that force inhertia loss (or, more likely: some in-between of inertia loss and risk taking).

Some more thoughts about the risk taking: that inevitably happens to everyone, even the least reckless. Magnitudes certainly differ, but it's always far from gone. Because when cycling, the brain unavoidably enters a state that would be called hypermiling if it happened while driving. The bad thing about stopping or slowing down isn't so much the time lost, it's the exertion required to get going again. And that logic does not just happen on the conscious level, it's much deeper. You'll hate applying the brakes even if, on the conscious level, exertion is the only goal of the ride because you're not going anywhere but doing a workout. "Stopping leads to exertion, don't stop" must be some preset circuit in our brains that has been there since before bipedalism. It's certainly also noticeable when driving (we hate the red light even when not in a hurry at all) but it's much stronger when the exertion isn't just a gentle touch with the right foot.

Back to that straight tunnel from the picture: something like that is extremely rare, because bike roads are rarely built completely separate from other roads and when they are not separate, the descent/ascent parts inevitably get folded into wherever they fit.

In theory (but not always in practice) the steepness of the road accessing the underpass should be within the limits stated for the type of road (so - again in theory - not too steep).

A good example of how NOT to design an underpass (very steep AND curve in the middle), this is Florence (Italy):

https://www.google.it/maps/@43.7754979,11.2351912,3a,75y,53....

But they did put on a sign to prevent pedestrians to access it, so the mugglers won't go hiding there ;).

At first glance that underpass didn't seem that steep, but then I went to look for the underpass which I feel is super steep, I realized, maybe it's just difficult to get a good sense of the steepness from streetview.

Here's one I've gone through and feel is a rather dangerous one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pU36XG6J89QL2nqJA

The view is from top of the underpass, but if you look to the back left you can see there's a downhill and then a really sharp 90° turn which might lead to really dangerous situations due to poor visibility and high speed.

Yes, streetview does not convey the actual situation, in person it is steep (though I have seen steeper ones).

That underpass is just after a bridge (over the river) so they couldn't make it less steep by making the ramp longer, but the cyclists (those that know the area) can turn on the right right before the ramp and use the "normal" roads/streets, someone that isn't already familiar with it is taken by surprise.

This view from a bit further renders a little better the situation:

https://www.google.it/maps/@43.7752485,11.2348264,3a,75y,22....

Admittedly, bike lighting is a solved problem by now, one shouldn't bike where you cannot see. There is always the risk of an obstacle you wouldn't expect, could be even an injured person blocking the way.

But of course, this doesn't justify any of those ridiculus and dangerous artificial blocks. Just clearly marking the bike paths with color should be good enough. If an car ever is caught there, well, rip apart the drivers license. Or just leave it to the bicyclists :p I have seen too many of those blockages myself, they are dangerous and often enough I cannot pass them with my bicycle.