Cycling Allowed on Bike Path! Yay!

Here be the thing I'm talking about.

From June 30, cyclists will finally be allowed to cycle on the Timar utca overpass of the Buda bank bike path.

According to vezess.hu blog, authorities finally gave in to reason, and will remove a long-standing rule that effectively forbade people from riding bikes on a bike path.

The ban applies to a section of the Eurovelo 6 bike path that takes cyclists over Árpád fejdelem via a shared-use pedestrian/cyclist bridge at the Timar utca HÉV stop. Signs on the overpass approaches (still existing) indicate that cyclists must dismount and push their bikes over the bridge. Ostensibly, the rule is there to protect pedestrians, and police have taken it seriously. In recent years, they've set up periodic dragnets and handed out steep fines to cyclists who don't comply, me, for example.

There's been talk for at least a couple years about construction of a separate bicycle bypass. However, according to the article, authorities are still in the process of obtaining property easements and the thing won't be built for at least two more years. In the meantime, they're lifting the riding restriction, while also requiring that cyclists keep their speeds below 10 km/hr on the bridge.

It's ironic that cars on the street below are whizzing by at 40-50 km/hr, and posing a much greater threat to the many pedestrians who cross on the surface to hasten their passage. This bridge is based on an outdated approach in which urban traffic management was nothing more than greasing the road system to allow for high-flow, fast motor traffic. In this view, pedestrians are obstacles, and infrastructure is designed to get them out of the way. We'll see what the "bicycle bypass" will look like, but from the way it's referenced, we can predict an old-school approach.