Boris Johnson recently addressed People’s Question Time at Battersea Arts Centre, by talking of his delightful cycle, carried on a river of blue from City Hall to Battersea Arts Centre on the CS7. As a local resident who cycles regularly down that route, I thought I’d share a snapshot of the glorious journey myself and Boris are accustomed to. 
This section of the CS7 is split level and comes with a fetching red fence.
What a smooth surface. Sublime.
The CS7 can also
be used to park any signs you may have.
Smoothing
traffic flow. By letting cars park on it.
This is the ghost of the CS7. not even one year old. Joking aside, the CS7
shows several faults in Boris’s transport “legacy”. What was trumpeted as a transport revolution was clearly a very expensive PR stunt, now that they can’t be bothered with the upkeep. Yet again, Boris uses the fact that he cycles to detract from the fact that he
can’t provide for cyclists. Within two days of the CS7 being laid it was being dug up by a water company. If the CS7’s dilapidated now (and these photos are taken over a quarter mile distance) what will it look like in May 2012, election time?
At War With The Motorist 
Maybe it’s a south London thing. CS3 is much much nicer!
Entirely predictable. You’d think Boris would be embarrassed by this kind of thing, but I expect he’ll just bluster his way out of it with some diversionary nonsense.
I’ve noted that one of the Superhighway ‘elephant’s feet’ markings on the southern approach to Southwark Bridge (outside the short-stay parking bays) has been obliterated by roadworks, and not repainted, leaving a large pothole.
The Superhighways are disintegrating in front of our very eyes.
I guess the wider public probably thinks that just because a politico deomstratively rides a bike, like Cameron, Bozo and hus deputy Kit Malthouse, they must be “pro-cycling”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Like some (to be fair, not all) cycle campaigners or groups, what they are “pro” is what they need for themselves – if you are a confident cyclist, that is not very much, and if you are full-blown vehicular, it virtually nothing (apart from being left alone).
Bozo and his pals are in any real sense anti-cycling because they libertarian right-wingers who believe that anyone should be able to do what they like where they like when they like without let or hindrance from the state, just as long as they have the money to pay for it (except of course, they don’t pay to use the roads – we all do through our income taxes and VAT etc).
Even Ken, for all his faults, was better than that.
And here I was under the impression that the CSs would be smooth, fast, have a lower rate of roadworks and be checked for regularly for holes. S’pose I’m just naive. See the video (4mins50).
Ohyes. CS7 was a glorious, smooth, zippy route in to town when it opened. Beautifully re-surfaced, respected by motorised traffic (mostly, although moped and motorbikes get a bit… Special at times) and by far the quickest, most pleasant way to get to The City in the morning.
Now… pot-holes, subsided road surface, missing manhole covers(!), constant road-works, cars and vans parked in it after the dot of 8am and then again at 6pm.
It’s still better than some of the cross-town routes without blue cycle routes, for sure, but it’s far far away from the utopia we were promised. And as for the traffic lights at the 3-4 junctions around Elephant and Castle that can leave cyclists at a red light for up to 3 minutes or more and the phasing means that you get through one set, down a cycle-only lane and the next set have now gone red for another god knows how long… never mind the bendy buses that sit across this junction in the evening commute time – http://is.gd/TsELy1 – making sure you have to wait through 3/4 cycles of the lights before you can make progress…
We have similar ones in Manchester – where you see decay, I see the forward thinking of transport planners who;
“…have foreseen the day that cycling’s modal share increases to the point that such separate facilities are unnecessary (everyone will be on bicycles, after all). By the time this facility’s surface has crumbled to dust, the cycling utopia guaranteed us by such foresight and wondrous facilities will have surely have arrived, meaning any money spent on maintaining it would have been senselessly wasted.”
(http://monkeyphoto.posterous.com/dont-manchesterize-2)