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Hull City Council painted parking bays in new cycle lane

Admits mistake and says spaces will be removed

Cars parked in cycle lanes are frequently an issue – but they’re not normally there because the council has painted parking bays. Hull City Council has admitted doing just this, but says it was a mistake.

Hull Live reports that Spring Bank recently had a painted cycle lane added that is shared with buses, motorcycles and taxis.

All on-street parking spaces were to be removed with off-road parking bays retained.

However, four of the parking spaces were painted back in again over the weekend.

Each bay also has a sign saying it can be used as a loading bay for early morning and late afternoon commercial deliveries and for one-hour of parking for motorists between 9.30am and 4.30pm.

In a statement, the council said: "The parking bays on the cycle lane in Spring Bank are being removed. There is to be no parking in the cycle lanes."

Hull City Council was awarded up to £1.4m of emergency active travel funding to put towards cycling schemes.

Figures show about 43 per cent of adults in the city do not have access to cars.

Commenting on suggestions that cycle lanes were ‘causing congestion’ last week, the deputy leader of Hull City Council, Daren Hale, said this wasn’t true. He pointed out that a number of people were falsely ascribing to cycle lanes delays resulting from road traffic collisions and Highways England carrying out flood prevention works.

He also said that because of Hull’s “tight road network” some cycle lanes were in bus lanes.

“As parking occurred in many bus lanes off-peak, this caused pinch points forcing buses and cars, and cyclists into only one lane. If buses move more efficiently and are on-time, people will be more likely to use them. This will benefit all road users and not just buses and cyclists.”

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9 comments

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randonneur | 3 years ago
1 like

I blame the contractor just as much as the service heads who implemented this. Are they blind and dumb, do they just follow orders without question?

Another reason to stay out of bike lanes.

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Captain Badger replied to randonneur | 3 years ago
4 likes

Contractors do indeed follow orders without question. They're given the specification and location which they have to fulfil within a given time frame or won't get paid. This is where a project manager (for the client) comes in. The contractor won't (in fact can't) spend time confirming orders which have already been given., so the PM has to have made sure that all the instructions they are providing is correct. A competent PM would have visited site, and double-checked the orders prior to issuing, knowing that whatever they tell the contractor to do will get done, and be paid for. 

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Hirsute replied to randonneur | 3 years ago
3 likes

Yes they do. They are there to make money, so will charge for extra work where the spec is wrong and the work is to be redone.
They aren't going to do an adjacent pothole because they won't get paid for that, even though it would be beneficial to do it now.

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arowland replied to Hirsute | 3 years ago
1 like

Absolutely. And if councils had their own departments instead of being forced to tender everything to private contractors, they could use their common sense, be proactive, even ring the right person in the department to question instructions if they don't make sense on the ground, and generally save tax payers' money rather than deliberately waste it.

But what do I know? There is a mindset in engineering circles that you follow the specifications to a T because they are supposed to have been checked and double-checked and if you deviate from them, any subsequent problems become your fault. Common sense be damned. A good thing if you are building a bridge that might fall down if you get it wrong -- less so when you are painting a parking space where there obviously shouldn't be one.

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arowland replied to randonneur | 3 years ago
0 likes
randonneur wrote:

Another reason to stay out of bike lanes.

Yup. I will ignore all cycle lanes from now on because someone in Hull painted a parking bay in one by mistake.

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mdavidford | 3 years ago
5 likes

And yet someone still decided to park the first vehicle there outside the bay, on the double yellows...

cool

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Hirsute replied to mdavidford | 3 years ago
1 like

Yeah, but car

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brooksby | 3 years ago
3 likes

"Left Hand?  Meet Mr Right Hand.  No, I don't know what he's doing..."

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Jetmans Dad replied to brooksby | 3 years ago
1 like

More like "Oh ... is it doing something?".

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