Corfu abandoned its expensive new cycle lanes too soon it seems.
What a cavalier attitude towards investment, planning and infrastructure development!
See the Huffington Post or Kathimerini, article by Karolina Tagaris (Reuters)
See also my posting of May 2010
Those cycle lanes without regulation turned into parking spaces, pedestrian walkways in addition to the pavements, and general confusion given the various exceptions granted those parking cars in them - e.g. traders serving premises, disabled (a category that unfortunatley seemed to include 'inconvenienced' by walking from a designated carpark) and emergency vehicles (which again became an expanded category including cops on coffee breaks). I was glad to see the last of that expensive fiasco. To make cycle lanes work you have to enforce the law that they are for cyclists. Yes it was a farce. Anyone being pilloried in Corfu? They should be. That said I find once near town that much traffic is so slowed by congestion that cycling is the best way to get about. But - touch wood - I've urban cycled for over a decade, know the risks and am v.careful. Getting into Corfu town on a bicycles would involve taking a culpable risk with the lives of the cyclists - children and adults.
ReplyDeleteI nearly always use my bike when in Corfu town, if travelling on my own. Definitely not a good idea for children. It's not that I was praising the original design or implementation of the now abandoned lanes, but rather that I was condemning the huge waste of money involved in installing them without adequate planning or consultation. Some contractors must have made a lot of money?
ReplyDeleteHow I wish someone could trace the story of this project from inception to its end. it would be a case study in how these squalid little projects get agreed and their ill-gotten proceeds shared to the disbenefit of the citizens of Corfu. The dense opacity of these processes is what makes them so repeatable. I wish I had a Greek friend who could use some equivalent of UK/US 'freedom of information' legislation to dig out the papers describing this life and death of the 2009-2011 Corfu Cycle Lanes Programme.
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