Construction blocks the path

In the last few weeks several blogs have posted videos of construction blocking the bikeways. As expected, in the Netherlands there usually is a good alternate route with clear signage.

A few days ago the path near a supermarket was closed by construction huts. So the next time I took the camera with me to get a video. Starts with a good, wide bikeway...

When there was only the huts, I got around them by going left through the empty parking lot that is hardly ever used. On a later ride, they had put a fence around the work area. Nobody wants people milling about their work space, and especially not when you're working on ladders. So now I had to ride through the car park on the right. Oh, the horror. :-)

How about  the signage? Well, there was the rather useless round red-and-yellow sign saying you can't go through here. Some kind of arrow pointing which way to go would have been nice so I wouldn't have tried going left first. And there was no sign for drivers to look out for people going around the fence, but maybe they expected the drivers to use their brains and do it anyway. There are no temporary paths marked by bollards or fences or any limitations on the parking so the drivers are not inconvenienced by the construction.

Sure, this is only one of the three routes for bikes and pedestrians (not counting going through the parking lot). So maybe there could have been a detour sign earlier, like 50 meters before the beginning of the video where I could have turned right and taken the other route.

And another clip to provide some comic relief for an otherwise gloomy post. Evening sunshine (the video was shot after 7pm yesterday) , green grass, new leaves growing on the trees and...

New video: Silly me!

I got around to do some video editing, and uploaded the first bit to youtube. It's just two short clips of me being not so smart and doing silly things.

In the first part I cross a street in front of a car. The driver gets a scare and steps on his brakes a little. Or he stomped on the gas. Anyway his tyres are screeching. The snow piles are high so they block his visibility, and on such a bright white day any dust or scratches on the windshield make it harder to see while driving against the sun. So maybe I was not so smart when I didn't yield to him like I was supposed to, although the car was far away.

Also the car was white, and it's not very visible against the white snow. How come the media is not demanding hi-viz paint jobs on cars? Oh, that would be war on the motorist...

In the other clip I'm leaving the railway station. I'd like to turn left, and then right. But there's a long queue of cars, and trying to filter into the moving queue of cars on icy street is not something I wanted to try. Somehow the cars polish the ice so it's often more slippery than ice on sidewalks and bikeways, even without gritting. And streets are not gritted. Then there was the taxis narrowing the road and the oncoming traffic. So the safest option was to illegally cycle on the sidewalk. Of course, I could also have chosen some other route.

And once I'm on the sidewalk cycling at breakneck speed, I notice that the 'oncoming traffic' includes a police van...

A comparison video

I uploaded a new video to youtube. It shows the same parts of the bikeways in October, November and March.

I do have some video from December, but it was too dark for the camera so it's so blurry that I decided to not use it. In January and February I did not even bother to try videoing, as it was too dark and cold for the md80.

Why is that video in so small window? How do I make it bigger?

In the October parts you can see me cycling over the frozen puddles. I guess it was the first ice of the season. :-) The route shown is one of the possible routes between the university and downtown. It's also the route I use when I go shopping in a shop east of the university.

My next video will be either about the cycling bridges or cycling in downtown. Maybe I should have a poll, let my readers decide. But as there are only two of them, there might be a tie. In that case, I'll make a video of the underpasses I didn't show on the first video. I think I've got a dozen of them already...