Circular Vehicling Campaigning.

This is a tale of 3 roundabouts:

One near Vienna that has shown to be good for cars but dangerous for cyclists.

http://diepresse.com/home/panorama/oesterreich/1564400/Tulln_Kreisverkehr-fur-Radler-unsicherer

and one in the UK designed by an bunch of cretins, to be paid for out of cycling infrastructure funds and approved by cycling organisations.

http://departmentfortransport.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/bedford-borough-council-traffic-department-you-are-a-bunch-of-cretins/

Both are designed purely for cars and both have cycling organisations encouraging cyclists to take the lane for better safety.

I could go on and try to explain why this is stupid but Austrian and some British cycle campaigning organisations clearly think they know better than the Dutch.  They are clearly not listening to anyone who tries to explain why the Dutch systems work and that putting yourself in the way of something dangerous is not a natural response normal people will choose as a pleasant method of stopping that thing from hurting them.

The third roundabout is the downward spiral of the road environment. If we really care about main stream cycling, and want the society our children live in to benefit from its many positive effects,  then we have to break the circle of expecting cyclists to behave like cars and drivers to behave like cycles.  This only creates more people forced to use cars even for short urban trips and road design focused on coping with higher and higher volumes of dense motor traffic.  The resulting conflict and pressure for space polarizes groups and makes sensible policy politically impossible.