Transcription: a photo of a shared pathway entrance with a series of steel pipes placed to create very narrow pathways to enter. The width is hard to tell from the angle of the photo, but far too narrow for a wheelchair or bicycle to fit.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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I've seen these around a bit. I think the idea is you walk through the side while pushing your bike through the middle. But you can ride through if you've had a bit of practice.
They want to keep out motorbikes, though, so they need to be pretty skinny.
Honestly coming from a place where even normal banana bars are being removed from path entrances, I think "they want to keep out motorbikes" is an incredibly lazy reason to have such a terrible and inaccessible design. Police enforcement is the appropriate way to deal with rare cases where someone takes their motorbike onto a clearly illegal path.
As a general guiding principle, even if we ignore the accessibility issues for wheelchairs, fat pedestrians, or more unusual types of bicycles, if your intended design involves expecting cyclists to get off their bike, that is a horrible design. Bike infrastructure should never expect a cyclist to dismount any more than car infrastructure should expect a driver to get out and push.
I have lived in areas where people ride motor bikes in areas supposed to be for pedestrians and bikes. They did it all the time. Some would ride recklessly, others were just riding their mopeds as a quicker path than using the road. It's not the intent of the path and as a pedestrian it definitely puts you off using the path.
When I'm riding a bike, I haven't had any issue with these types of bars, you can ride through them once you get some practice. So long as they are only used at entrances and not staggered along the path like your banana bar example then I would rather have them than not.