Giving cycle paths primacy over adjoining roads
This is a pretty far reaching discussion point, but one I feel is important in establishing cycling as a first class means of transport.
I apologise if this is something for which a consensus is well established, but I was unable to find anything specific on it. Or indeed, or if there is little that can be done!
The issue is that though Cambridge has loads of pavement cycle lanes, they tend to be of the kind that stop at each and every adjoining road. This is suboptimal and really slows down one's progress.
In some cases there are "helpful" give-way markings to remind the cyclist that cars go first. Slightly better are give way markings to both the adjoining road and the cycle lanes, but my experience has been that the road give way marking is often simply ignored (and it takes a brave cyclist to not slow down despite knowing they'd arrive first). Also, cars turning into the minor road from the more major road are not clearly required to give way to cyclists.
The new slightly raised cycle lanes with bus islands are clearly much better in this regard and seem to be treated by drivers with the same priority as the road they are part of. So on the whole the new infrastructure seems to be dealing with the problem properly.
However, slightly against this trend, I noticed that the wonderful cycle lane by the guided bus route by the new Great Kneighton centre (marked on the map) has a dropped kerb to the not-yet-commissioned road and little in the way to indicate it's not going to be sliced in half when the road is opened properly.
Another trend seems to be to coerce cyclists to use pedestrian/cycle crossings at junctions, e.g. where the guided bus route ends at Francis Crick Avenue and the cycle lane continues onto the Addenbrookes site.
This is part of a bigger question about how much cyclists should be considered with the same priority as motorists (consider how long it takes the cycle road crossings on Fen Causeway to change, despite all the traffic moving at a snails pace).
What if anything can we do about this? What I really want is at a minimum for cyclists to be given _equal_ priority to the drivers.