Reports from the [Prague] cycling commission are not interesting when things go smoothly. That’s why I’ve omitted my slightly satirical comments on the happenings within the cycling commission over the past few years. However, time has torn through the curtain, and hints of history repeating itself have led me to a return to the past. In short, old times call for old solutions. If you want to know which paths won’t get funding, why we agreed to something we disagree with, and where the police gave the designer the choice to either ban cyclists or kill them, read on bravely.
Official minutes from the commission meetings can be found here.
The meeting on Monday, March 3, promised to be a great show due to the large number of items on the agenda and guests invited to room 135 of Prague City Hall. Experts already raised their hands during the security check at the entrance, which says more about the openness of city hall than the level of terrorist risk, and everyone who should have arrived did.
After waiting for a long time, we had direct information from TSK (Technical Administration of Roads). This item had been somewhat neglected in recent months, which I understand. Actually, there’s no reason why a representative from TSK should explain to us why planned infrastructure works won’t be built when it’s not them that refused to fund them, but the city councilor for finance.
This time, however, it turned out that TSK’s participation in the meeting would be necessary. The Kačerov – Labuť path on route A42 (upgraded in the meantime to A7) has been in preparation for years and is heading for realization, and for this purpose, the Prague 4 building office requested an opinion from the cycling commission on the proposed traffic regime. Which is not exactly common unless there’s some catch hidden in it.
Well, it turned out that this catch could hang half an ox in a butcher’s shop. After expanding the existing sidewalk between Michelská and the railway to 3.5 meters, the city district came up with a way to cripple the anticipated traffic regime and allow only a sidewalk with permitted cycling instead of an equal mixed path with pedestrians. The traffic regime, which is to be used in developments where pedestrians prevail and bicycles can only be tolerated, thus continues to expand into the outskirts. To places that are supposed to form the backbone of Prague’s cycling traffic, standards, non-standards.
We soon understood that the reason why the building office requested the commission’s opinion on this nonsense is a safeguard against later legitimate complaints. And if the commission disagreed with the regime, the building office could use it to do what to the path? Not allow it.
So, we spent twenty minutes fuming and looking for a way to express in the resolution that we agree with the traffic regime, but it infuriates us unreasonable. However, we ultimately couldn’t craft such a dressed-undressed sentence, so even though the resolution passed, the chair of the commission disagreed against the vote of all present members.
Someone here still has their pride. Old pros, familiar with the 2010-2014 period, have long since gotten over it. We know how it goes when political support for the topic is expressed by the mayor saying that a cycle path does not belong in the city. Although sending this proposal, after nineteen years of preparation, to the weeds due to the cycling commission’s disagreement with the blue sheet option, would actually illustrate the current position of Prague in developing cycling quite nicely.
Another report was that no financial resources have been allocated for the continuation of the preparation of the Krejcárek – Balabenka path (Prague 3–Prague 9). The correct approach for this project would be so-called design & build, meaning that a company competes for both the project preparation and implementation, ensuring that the preparation is actually carried through to implementation. At the same time, however, the city commits to gradually paying for it all, which, guess what – it doesn’t want to do. It’s sad because we could have had this path already in 2010 when the old connection to Krejcárek was made, and it just narrowly didn’t work out then.
Since then, the conditions for preparation have worsened as the demands of the Railway Administration on the theoretically possible use of land around the railway have grown. From the good corridors through which it could have led without losing height, none are left; eventually, we will be happy for a misery ending on Turnovská street, that is if the Railway Administration doesn’t plan another eight tracks there for construction in the year 2300. So we discussed ways to finance the continuation of the preparation so that it wouldn’t be totally killed off when a sensible method that would carry it through to the end isn’t considered due to financial reasons.
This year, there might be a competition for the renewal of the path on A0 in the section K Cementárně – Na Drážkách in Prague 16–Radotín. Which is fine, just given that no one ever knows when it will be realized, the preparation of the subsequent section on K Cementárně street, where about a hundred meters of legalized sidewalks are missing, wasn’t proceeding. So, cyclists will typically be thrown among cars in the inner curve of the blind bend of the highway feeder.
The project for the renewal of historic bike paths in Letňanská street, which were created in the fifties of the last century during the construction of the trolleybus line, might be killed by… the renewal of the trolleybus line.
There is no money for the first stage of the cycle highway between Balabenka and Vysočanské nádraží. Same story. The cycle highway is even in the council’s policy statement, and Prague 9 wants it, so maybe the mayor there will manage to squeeze it out of his party comrade at city hall. In the engineering process, there was a requirement from the IPR for additional lighting and a request from the Railway Administration that Prague builds the rail paths further away from the railway, because there will probably be some kind of VRT (high-speed track) there too.
For the planned completion of the Cholupice – Dolní Břežany path, there is disagreement from some owners, which is common and will be resolved. If not otherwise, then by shortening the path, and riding through the private fields on the existing road.
A lighter topic was the point on cycling logistics. It can be briefly summarized: When will bicycles finally relieve motorized logistics, with 70,000 courier vehicles driving to the center? Well, whenever Prague wants, as always.
Colleague Jan Prosa proposed reducing the speed on the A2 at the crossings of Křižovnická Street near Charles Bridge to 20 km/h by creating a shared space. The structural quality of buildings above the road are suffering. The discussion quickly moved from the fact that trams would hardly slow down anyway, to the reality that the biggest problem there is the twenty thousand cars. And it wasn’t me who brought it up. AutoMat’s tactic in recent years is not to provoke, so not constantly reminding everyone that we have been waiting for this for twenty years.
The resulting resolution was somewhat distant from the original input and stated that the cycling commission supports limiting car traffic on Smetanovo nábřeží and Malá Strana. All present agreed with it. So, we waved it off again, for how many times now?
At this rather unexciting point, we were looking for ways to convince the Railway Administration that rail paths are called ‚rail‘ because they are supposed to lead along the railway as much as possible and always on the same side for at least several kilometers. Maybe Prague will try to agree on some memorandum with the Railway Administration to cooperate in the design of tracks and paths, and if God allows, maybe even buy some land simultaneously. I am an idealist.
We were presented with the latest version of the cycling solution on Wilsonova Street, generally known as the highway/magistral in front of the main station. You must have noticed the project with the crossing in front of the Fantova building, which irritated everyone who fears that they would have to stop not because of other motorists in a queue but because of some inferior pedestrians. The project originally assumed a dual solution for cyclists, namely dedicated bike lanes and legal riding on the sidewalk in front of the building, which is „good for Prague“. Thanks to Tomáš Cach, it was significantly tuned, although the forced choice between speed and comfort is not the way to significantly lift cycling out of the dust of a one to two percent modal share.
Based on the validity of the Active Mobility Standards and the increased emphasis on protected routes, the IPR (Institute of Planning and Development) attempted to design the northern direction at the building as a Danish-style elevated bike lane. Which in theory is absolutely correct.
However, the implementation was absolutely dreadful. Preservationists ordered that if the Danish lane was behind parked cars, they do not consider it part of the roadway and it cannot therefore be made of asphalt or vertically separated from the sidewalks. From a razor-thin corridor for fast passage around the station, it thus became a strip merging with the sidewalk in a place where tourists unfamiliar with Prague will be boarding the Airport Express with mountains of luggage. You can imagine the consequences.
An even better idea on how to destroy the Danish lane came from the police. They ended it at the turn to Bulhar with a textbook cyclist execution site in the form of crossing a turning lane at a place where you won’t know which of the cars continuously whizzing in the right lane is going straight or turning. And the cyclist will be cleverly hidden behind the curve so that they won’t be noticed until the last moment. When asked why the police wanted it precisely this way, we learned that their alternative was to make cycling over the flyover above Bulhar impossible at all. In other words, at that spot, the police decided to either ban cyclists or kill them. Which I understand, someone might wish for that with cyclists who dare to ride on the highway, but it shouldn’t be done so blatantly.
The subsequent debate was mainly a squabble between supporters of the dual solution and Danish lanes. It ended with the approval of a resolution demanding the project be corrected without it being clear whether it should be a dual solution or not. So, if we’re good, we might get cobblestones of a slightly different color in the bike lane, and the entrance before Bulhar may be adjusted so that it only kills occasionally. If we’re naughty, we’ll get the dual solution and opponents of cycling will have another red herring to ride on.
Peroutkova Street in Prague 5 will undergo reconstruction along with the addition of a trolleybus line. The project plans for an 8-meter-wide roadway, meaning „dedicated bike lanes won’t fit.“ And since it’s a public transport project, we can also forget about continuous protected bike lanes. Expanding the roadway is impossible due to the trolleybus poles. I would like to take this opportunity to point out again that Prague once constructed a segment of a trolleybus line in combination with Danish-style bike lanes, which is now, however, a forgotten art of a long-lost civilization.
The resolution, bypassing the unfulfillable demand for a protected solution, was something along the lines that the current project had too few protective bike lanes. It was adopted via correspondence, given the late hour and the dissenting vote from the representative of ROPID. The truth is, whether there are more or fewer bike lanes, a fundamentally poorly designed profile won’t save it.
The construction of the Dvorecký Bridge will, of course, bring restrictions along route A2. We passed an extensive resolution demanding that it only be significantly uncomfortable for bikes – i.e., better than the planned horrible. Especially the period from October to November, when the tram tracks will be connected to the existing track, will be challenging. Unless something changes, we can look forward to passing through the construction site on walkways a meter wide, probably with about thirty signs saying „Cyclist, you’re not on the superior cycle route A2 here, buddy, you’re in Prague, where we only make detours for cars, so suck it up and push.“ Similarly, as it was on the left bank.
The last standard item was a proposal to add elevators to the highway bridge in Suchdol between the A1 and A2 trails and the A0 bridge. We approved, why not. After all, we’re asking the Road and Motorway Directorate for routes in another thirty locations where it was too early in the EIA documentation and will be too late in the construction approval process. We wanted the elevators also because other solutions – like a path on the slope – would probably disturb the landscape character of the valley with the highway bridge, which the environmental department, protecting Prague’s panorama from malignant cable cars, will never allow.
And with that, we parted for the day, as it was not the appropriate hour for anything more.
This is an adjusted machine translation using Automat’s CycleLingo Translator (ChatGPT) of this article: https://mestemnakole.cz/2024/03/zpravy-z-breznove-cyklokomise-4/
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