Last week I wrote about the new bridge in the Olympic Park and described it as "for now very much a pristine waste of money". An anonymous reader got in touch and said...
"If 'very pristine waste of money' is something you're interested in seeing more of, may I suggest taking a walk up to the junction of Northwall Road and Temple Mills Lane."
They're not wrong. I've been watching the reworking of this road junction at the other end of the Park with increased incredulity over the past few months, and the end result is both pristine and wasteful, not to mention inexplicably unnecessary.
Northwall Road was added for the Olympics so that back-of-house would have private access around the north of the site. It was also built to a highstandard, a lengthy swoop with its own private cutting beside the Velodrome, and looked like it would become an integral part of the legacy road network. Not so.
For almost a decade concrete blocks have been used to keep both ends of the road blocked off, one barrage up by Here East and the other here at Temple Mills Lane. No other junctions exist, because that's how good a shortcut this might have been. The road instead gets used by not many pedestrians, a few cyclists and the occasional film crew. See my in-depth post from April 2020.
So it was a surprise to see workmen busy at the eastern end a few months ago ripping up the road and creating something new. Perhaps they're opening up the road to traffic, I thought. But they were not.
Instead they were removing the original road surface and any pretence that vehicles were ever supposed to pass through. In its place they laid a broad flat surface suitable for walking, and across the middle an unusually complicated cycle path with mini zebra crossings. I simply cannot comprehend why.
The original mundane cycle lane alongside Temple Mills Lane now swerves onto pristine tarmac to cross zebra number 1, laid to assist hardly anyone crossing the street. It then bends sharp left into Northwall Road, where an additional obstacle is a new line of metal posts installed to keep vehicles at bay. Almost immediately it crosses zebra number 2, then veers right across what could be a proper road if only that too hadn't been bollarded off. This section looks very much like a toucan crossing except there are no road markings, no lights and no vehicles.
The two-way cycle path continues across zebra 3 towards the subway under the A12 at which point the infrastructure abruptly stops and everyone gets to share the path instead. Meanwhile zebras 4 and 5 help to guide pedestrians across perpendicular spurs of cycle lane heading up (and down) Northwall Road. All five crossings have tactile paving on either side, because no expense has been spared, except there's no rational reason for any of this segregation to have taken place.
Zebra 3 assists almost nobody to cross a stream of cyclists that's rarely more than an intermittent dribble. Zebras 4 and 5 assist a few more pedestrians to avoid even fewer cyclists, because Northwall Road is not a destination which invites regular access. This point is proven a few metres up the road where the new cycle lane abruptly stops and the old narrow one is obstructed by a row of concrete blocks.
I bet it looked good on the drawing board and I bet it complies with all relevant junction-based best practice. It's just that in its current state it's entirely unnecessary, there being no vehicles to avoid nor any serious risk of collision. Pedestrians and cyclists could easily have shared this enormous space in perfect safety without the need for an isolated island of lanes and crossings created by months of civil engineering works.
It's perfectly possibly that this is not the junction's end state, for example if vehicles are eventually to be allowed along Northwall Road as a shortcut, but the narrowing of the entrance very much suggests that's not the case. It may be that in a few years time I'll look back and think "ah, OK, so that's why they did it". But when there are so many other corners of E20 where inadequate cycling infrastructure needs a proper safety upgrade, this does look very much like a pristine waste of money.
