Quality connection to Csepel

Here's downtown Csepel, aka District XXI, a community of more than 80,000 on the north end of Csepel Island.

Today, I did a bike-nerd thing: I went out to inspect a new piece of local cycling infrastructure. The 'infra' in question is a 2.9 km path running from the village center of Csepel to the northern tip of Csepel Island and then across Kvassay Bridge to southern Pest not far from the Rakoczi Bridge. Here's a map.

In the heart of Csepel, you'll find some attractive, Socialist-era housing estates with generous allotments
of green space and playgrounds and here, a bike path with connections to the town centre.

More characteristic are these much larger residential buildings.
Lots of green space, but these big buildings make for a heavy population density.

I'm glad I took the trip. This is a fine addition to the choice of day trips to quieter and greener places outside of downtown. And the quality of the path itself beats anything else I've seen in Budapest. Everything is done beautifully: Curb cuts and rail crossings are smooth as butter, a nice beveled concrete curb separates the sidewalk and the bike path, bright red and yellow paint highlights the crossings of all intersections and driveways, and the directional signs make finding your way a breeze.

Time will tell, the materials look good and the execution is top notch. It's a pleasure to ride on.

The rails on this level crossing are tucked away under a flat-as-a-pancake deck with a hard rubber surface.
State of the art stuff.

It's all a separate two-way path running on one side of the street -- Szabadkikötő út. In principle, 'best practice' in an urban setting would be to have one-way paths or lanes on both sides of the street. However, I was happy just to be on a separated path. Szabadkikötő út is a busy four-lane motor route and the traffic seemed to be moving well over the posted speed limit of 70 km/hr.

Although it makes for a nice pleasure ride, this path was built for commuting. It's one of six new paths built during the last year to connect outlying residential areas to the city centre. I'm curious how much traffic the path gets during a typical workday rush hour.

The few criticisms I'd have are the odd placement of bike racks, including these in the picture below. There was no store, transport stop or anything nearby that would merit a stop at this location. Either something is planned to built here, or these racks are just a waste of resources.

You can chain your bike up here -- if that's what you're into.

The other is the comparatively poor directional signage on the previously existing connecting path to Rakoczi Bridge. The new path is so good, it makes the rest of the network look bad.

The Kvassay Bridge

From here, there's no indication this underpass is for cyclists as well as for pedestrians -- no sign, no yellow markings next to the zebra. But you must go through this underpass to get from Rakoczi Bridge to the new Csepel bike path.

Here's a path toward Rakoczi Bridge, but it ends before it gets anywhere. Curiously, a sign indicates
the Eurovelo 6 route lies beyond the dead end. 

Fall time's fall time

This is the pothole the morning after it caught me by surprise.
Looks conspicuous now, but the night before, it was under a pond of water!

It's fall time in Hungary, and the elements are conspiring to weed out fair-weathered cyclists. On Tuesday, they nearly weeded out me.

On the way home Tuesday, I was cruising down Kiralyok utja, a fairly busy artery running through the Romai part neighbourhood of Obuda. It was cloudy, the light was dim and droplets from a drizzling rain were beading up on my glasses. Despite this raft of visual handicaps, my mind was musing on some abstract point about cycling infrastructure as I casually slalomed between puddles and storm detritus. Then suddenly, a more concrete aspect of infrastructure intruded on my reverie. BAM! My front tire fell into a gaping pothole, and at least one of my hands slipped off the handles. I skittered off the road and careered right for a hedge. In the helpless moment before impact, I thrust my right arm toward what I thought would be a solid fence underlying the greenery. Luckily there was none. I penetrated the hedge and fell down half way through. On the ground with a throbbing pain in my shin but no apparent bones broken, I disentangled my legs from the bushes and pushed myself to my feet.

A tight shot on the enemy pothole -- warts and all.

As one car after the other splashed by without acknowledging my plight, I cussed the motoring public. However, a boy about seven or eight years old walked by just then and, with an embarrassed grin, asked me if I was ok. I was too shaken to acknowledge the comedy of it just then, but by now, I can see that it must have been hard for him to suppress a cackle after seeing an adult bike straight off the road into a hedge for no apparent reason. Still, he must have recognised trauma on my face, and it was sweet of him to inquire about my well-being -- and to refrain from actually cackling.

Thankfully, I came through with nothing more than bruised bones. It reminded me of the hazards of riding in less than ideal conditions on roads that are less than forgiving. For a car, cracks and holes in the paving barely transmit through the suspension. But for cyclists, they're a real hazard. Every time I have an accident like this, it happens in the cold, dark period between now and April, when visibility declines and holes in the paving are concealed under mud puddles or glazed with ice.

This is the hedge I ran into. Didn't destroy it, but I did give it something to think about.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to check out exemplary cycling infrastructure in the town of Zwolle, Netherlands. All the roads there are like new, exceptionally well maintained, the cycle tracks amazingly well designed, the street lighting bright and clear.

It's not an original thought, but the point it underscores for me is that the test of good road infrastructure is not how well it serves at high noon on a sunny summer day, but how well it works in the rain, after dark for a bike commuter on the verge of the road.

Of course, we live in Budapest, and when we hit the streets we make allowances for the surprise pothole and the gaping seam in the tarmac. For the sake of our own hides, we adapt to it, but that doesn't mean we should accept it.

Disposable Bike Racks

I noticed these bike racks for the first time this weekend. They're right across from our building (on the little square on the south side of Margit körút at the start of Frankel Leó utca) so they must have been installed this past week. When I first noticed them, one was already knocked over and another was listing. This morning, I went down to take a picture of them and three of them were knocked flat and I believe another had been stolen.

Not to let the neighborhood's delinquent youth off the hook -- but these racks could have been knocked over by some néni's shopping cart. Or even a good gust of wind. The racks are made of light-gauge aluminum tubing, probably weighing less than a kilo a piece. Whoever installed them simply drilled holes into the ceramic pavers that cover the square and fastened them with screws and plastic expander plugs.

From the looks of it, the plugs were too skinny for the holes and just didn't hold. But even if they had, the pavers themselves are are no more than a kilo or two a piece and can quite easily be plucked from the ground. I'm tempted to requisition these things myself to make some bike parking in our building's courtyard. Of course, that would be disrespecting public property -- but then again, does this stuff deserve respect?

Prague Envy

Cycling development in Prague is going gangbusters compared to Budapest -- or at least it would seem so. A recent article gives a concise but comprehensive picture of the transport cycling scene in the Czech capital.

Official data from Prague City Hall shows cyclists with a 0.5-2 percent modal share, on par with the figures from Budapest. But Budapest's data is more than 10 years old, and the numbers have clearly gone up since then, especially considering the whole Critical Mass phenomenon only got started in 2004. (Tellingly, Prague's most recent Critical Mass drew 4,000 riders, compared to about 15,000 at Budapest's last one and 80,000 during the spring 2007 ride.)

Despite the fact that more people bike in Budapest, Prague seems to be doing a better job at cycling development.

A few tidbits from the article:

• Budapest has about 160 km of paths and routes while Prague has 135 km of bike paths and 360 of signed routes.
  
• Prague's long-term plan calls for the completion of more than 670 km of routes. Budapest is shooting no higher than 500.
  
• Prague has a new bike-share system (see photo). Budapest has none.
  
• Prague City Hall has a monitoring system in place to follow trends in cycling traffic (cycling trips are up 47% over the last three years). Budapest has no such system. And with no data on cycling levels, what rational basis is there for developing infrastructure and other services?
  

How can it be that the city with more demand for cycling improvements is getting less supply?