A brand new, empty streak of black tarmac ribbon, especially for bike riders. Sounds like utopia, doesn't it? One such example has popped up not far from where I live in Surrey, in the south of England, connecting one town with another. Lucky you, you might think. Except I'm not entirely sure we are.
Driving past it the other day, I was afforded a car's-eye view of a few of the things that are getting people so exercised about it in the local community groups: lovely new tarmac especially for bike riders (that's the perspective, but in fact it's a shared path), at a cost of endless jams at temporary traffic lights and roadworks and, at the last count, more than £1.5 million – and apparently not a soul using it. Even worse, the final, teeth-grinding straw from the driver's perspective, is that some cyclists are instead choosing to use the road, which has in fact been made narrower to accommodate the path.
