That’s a good question: will they work? I’m talking about the new Bacolod bicycle lanes project. I hope they do partly because they have cost P62M (about 1.1M USD). That’s a lot of money to spend on some yellow lines painted on the road.
However, the main reason I hope they work is to make the roads here safer for all users including cyclists and there are many of them in this country. You see the serious ones every day of the week clad in Lycra furiously pedaling away on their top-end machines.
Here is one reason why the good intentions are immediately dismantled by selfish car drivers. Take a look at the picture below.
You can immediately see what the problem is and how it’s caused. The real cause is drivers with a mindset that says, “I own the road and to hell with anyone else.” It is evident not only in the above image but on many other occasions here. For example, drivers too impatient to wait for a green so they set off prematurely on a red; blocking intersections even though the driver can make no forward progress; and counter-flowing as the driver is too impatient to wait in the correct lane for his or her turn to make orderly progress.
There’s the key: “orderly.” There is too much disorder and chaos on the roads here. It becomes the survival of the fittest to drive about our city streets.
It never ceases to amaze me that the normally friendly local turns into a different person when you put him behind a steering wheel. Not all. but a significant minority.
The real answer is not yellow lines. The answers are (a) enforcement and (b) better driver training.
Those who know me also know I have been writing about such things for the past three years. I even wrote a book about it because I was genuinely shocked by what I experienced on first arriving in the Philippines. That book is available as a Kindle eBook on Amazon but you may download it for free if you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
In fact, you can take a preview of it below.
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Motorists need to be made to take those lanes seriously. No one dare park over a bike lane here as I see in your picture!
As I say. lack of enforcement is one of the issues at play here. Nice to hear from you 🙂
Thanks. I’m always around, just don’t always have the time to comment. Especially the past month – out of town, working on a notebook and then my main computer decided to let me know it was ready to crash!! I think we’re back to normal now.
Sounds like you are as busy as me. That’s why I haven’t been posting here as much lately. So busy writing my books and my author website at http://www.stephenbentley.info takes up quite a bit of time too.
Understandable.