Where Warrington leads, the world follows. For several years, the Warrington Cycle Campaign's website (warringtoncycle-campaign.co.uk) has featured a superbly sardonic "facility of the month" - "dedicated to highlighting examples of how innovative design and outstanding engineering offer safety, utility, and comfort to cyclists". And now Warrington cyclists have published a "best of" anthology, Crap Cycle Lanes. The bad bike "infrastructure" named and shamed includes lanes that last about 15 feet before petering out under a parked car, paths blocked by fences and even walls, and routes with street furniture sprouting from the middle ready to mug anyone foolish enough actually to ride a bike on them. These follies are so hilariously egregious that you can't imagine how they could ever have been perpetrated in the first place ... yet the feature runs and runs.
Sadly, the joke is on us - since we are still expected to use these "crap cycle lanes". Only concerted lobbying by campaigners recently saw off a revision to the Highway Code that would have ascribed "contributory negligence" to cyclists who prefer not to use them. And this is where I have misgivings about bike lanes: they can be useful, but they can also hive off cyclists - segregating us and implicitly reducing our right to be on the road.
Interesting fact: cycling organisations spent the first half of the 20th century resisting the legal compulsion to ride with lights at night. This seems mad today, but the argument was very logical. Rather than the cyclist bearing the responsibility of being seen, the motorist had a duty of care to proceed with caution.
Infrastructure is not ideologically neutral either; even the bike path has a dark history. The Nazis were the first to develop and promote separate cycle lanes. A historical precedent that should not be pressed too hard, perhaps. After all, the largely liberal Dutch have among the highest levels of cycle use in the world, much of it on dedicated paths.
The crucial difference is that, as I cycle on a segregated lane through Bloomsbury in London, my heart is in my mouth every time the route crosses a road junction. There is no clarity about priority - and do not assume drivers will give way. Whereas in Holland (as in France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark), "defined liability" legislation means the motorist is always presumed to be at fault in a collision involving a cyclist. The effect is that any driver crossing a cycle lane stops and looks very carefully. Imagine the uproar if anyone were to suggest anything so outrageous here.
My personal ambivalence about bike paths allows one major exception of wholehearted endorsement. And that is anything done by Sustrans, which, under the leadership of the visionary John Grimshaw, has developed the National Cycle Network, chiefly on non-road routes (by converting old railway lines, canal footpaths and the like). The Sustrans project seems entirely complementary: it gives cyclists another option, rather than getting us out of the way of cars.
The latest Sustrans initiative is "Connect2", which aims to create links between routes and communities by installing bridges and tunnels that will make bike journeys quicker and more convenient potentially for millions. But its funding is part of a Big Lottery Fund contest for £50m - so it can happen only if you vote for it (see sustransconnect2.org.uk). We can laugh at the "crap cycle lanes", but perhaps we don't have to put up with them for ever.
