clairedavieswriter

Today’s lesson was ‘Cycling Infrastructure: how to do it (and how not to)’.
For my ride to Brussels, Guillaume had come up with a route that looked suspiciously like some of his less brilliant ideas from last year. For those who weren’t following that trip, his rationale could generally be summarised as ´Take the shortest route, and to hell with the traffic’. So when he suggested I follow the main N9 today, I was sceptical. Help desk (aka brother Mark in Norfolk, with some assistance from Google maps and satellite images), reassured me that in this instance Guillaume could be trusted. Indeed he could: the route started like this:

For a while it looked like this:

And later like this – the cycle path is the paler surface to the right, separated from moving traffic by the hard shoulder. It was at least this good for the better part of 80k.

It wasn’t the most exciting journey, given it was pretty much dead straight, but at least navigating wasn’t difficult, and there were occasional sights of interest. Guillaume liked the look of the Delirium Tremens brewery:

But Bernard was more moved by this WW1 memorial to members of the company of ‘chasseurs cyclistes’, which stood beside the road, surrounded by a field of young potatoes

Back on the road, we were either given priority over cars joining from the right or we had our own traffic lights. Without fail, drivers wanting to cross the cycle path waited for me to pass before they did so. After a while, I stopped looking over my left shoulder at junctions, and just swept across like the locals. Considering I was right next to a main road, it was surprisingly relaxing

In Ghent, whose extraordinary skyline is just impossible to capture in photos:

… the infrastructure is equally good, but the tram tracks made Bernard nervous, particularly when we had to ride between them, or cross them on a diagonal

The trams themselves were almost silent but somehow managed to avoid mowing down the crowds of pedestrians with whom they shared the same space

So much for the ‘how to do it’ part of the lesson.
No photos are available for the ‘how not to do it’ part, because I was too busy trying to stay alive. From my albeit brief experience, Brussels, capital city of what I’d started to think was a cycling paradise, is the most dangerous place I have ever cycled in, bar none. I had more close shaves in 10k of riding through it than in the previous 1,500k. The careful and attentive drivers of Flanders were nowhere to be seen and the glorious ribbon of safe separated riding vanished in a cloud of exhaust fumes, ill-parked cars and broken glass.
I could not have been more relieved to reach the sanctuary of Nikki and Martin’s house, unscathed. Though it was clear I’d had a hair raising experience:

I’m booked in for some R&R now for a couple of days, in preparation for the Ardennes. See you on Tuesday.