Irish cyclists urge government to halt scheme to turn hard shoulders into cycle lanes

I think the important thing here is that they're challenging the wasting of money on supposedly cycle-friendly projects that always seem to end up as a useless waste of space. As many here point out, cycle lanes seem to begin and end seemingly at random and rarely offer any added safety.
The government does need to start managing this better and make sure that the money stops being wasted. More often than not it looks more like their trying to spend their alternative travel budget rather than make any real improvement. I would gladly swap all my towns crappy cycle lanes for a few filled in pot holes!

Converting hard shoulders is a waste of money, designated cycle lanes end up with far more debris on them, and they usually run in fits and starts, which means they are more suited for slow pedalling commuters than people out for exercise or fun.

Another problem is that you automatically loose the right of way at every turn off, as it is now if you are cycling along the main road and a car wants to take a left turn or join from the left, the cyclist has the right of way to continue straight on, barring a junction stop sign. Put in a cycle lane and the cyclist will loose this right of way and be expected/obliged to stop and check for traffic at each of these turns.

It is understandable to disbelieve the notion of hard shoulders being self-cleaning, but if you have driven much in the Republic you will understand why it is actually a sensible statement.

They are not "hard-shoulders" in the sense we understand them here, ie provided to permit broken down vehicles to clear the road. Over there, motorists still show a level of courtesy to each other which would be regarded as eccentric at least over here. When a driver sees someone aproaching him from behind at higher speed, he automatically pulls to the left to permit the overtaker to get past cleanly while he drives, at his full intended speed ie 40, 50 or so, on the "hard shoulder". I have done it myself many times, although it can sometimes be scary because overtakers are quite often slow to overtake, and hard shoulders have an irritating habit of ending suddenly without warning, before the guy has got safely past!

You can probably now see why a cyclist would demur at turning them into cycle lanes - they would give an entirely false sense of security to cyclists who might not anticipate that drivers will continue to behave as before, using the hard shoulders as a form of "crawler lane", but at higher speeds.

I agree, I live in northern Ireland, Lurgan to be precise and our council has loads of cyclpaths that you could hardly ride a tractor over never mind a bike, they stop every couple of hundred yards for every junction, cars park on them and they're covered in glass, not exactly cycling friendly.

Struggling to understand what he means about self-cleaning - I think he might be saying that, because they arent segregated, they get cleaned by the rain washing off the road, whereas if you put in a curb to segregate them then the water doesnt flow through... That obviously totally ignores the fact that the traffic on the road is what pushes all the debris and dirt out of the way - usually on to the hard shoulder, as a.jumper rightly points out!

Seems like someone complaining for the sake of being visible, rather than for a valid reason, to be honest - the plans seem very high level and dont seem to say how the lanes will be set up, whether they will be segregated or not etc.

hard shoulders are self-cleaning? What planet is that muppet on? Everyone know that's where the puncture fairy lives and it's best to avoid hard-shoulder cycle lanes like the A5 in England.

hard shoulders are self-cleaning? What planet is that muppet on? Everyone know that's where the puncture fairy lives and it's best to avoid hard-shoulder cycle lanes like the A5 in England.