Maybe we should bombard Panoramas contact addresses with requests for investigations on the state of cycle paths. My nearest one has signs pointing down the road not the path, negligible markings including on a blind bend on a shared pavement, virtually no signs beyond those direction ones and if you follow it fully you end up on a cycling prohibited footbridge.
That would be considerably more use than yet another "cars v bikes" manufactured-conflict show. It would be nice for someone with a bit of clout to pick some of the most bonkers examples and, for each one, push at the bit of government responsible for it (often county councils, but sometimes National Highways and the DfT who really ought to know and do better) to find out how it ended up in that state and why it's taking so long to bring up to standard, maybe comparing with how quickly defective carriageways get changed... and I can think of some roundabouts that weren't defective but drivers proved themselves incompetent to drive on correctly, so the council changed them to make it easier. No enforcement, no attempt to remove incompetent drivers from the roads.
Or they could look at the shocking state of maintenance, with examples like 4 months of buck-passing before anyone covered a 1m x 1m x 1m deep hole in the middle of a cycleway and another month to repair it; or half the tarmac being broken up by weeds "does not meet our criteria for intervention" (directly contradicting published policy documents); and that's before considering the widespread roadwork cowboys who stick non-reflective fences in front of deep holes or work vehicles dumped on cycleways with no warning signs and no diversions on the approaches. For comparison, similar holes in the middle of the carriageway get fixed within 2 hours (
they have appeared at Necton a few times over the years), roads get weedkilled and winter salting does a lot to reduce weeds too, so they rarely break up as totally before being repaired; and roadwork cowboys failing to follow the safety code of practice are moved off carriageways within minutes (or hours at worst).
If the government is going to achieve its stated aim of doubling cycling (which is already fairly pathetic, from about 1 in 50 commuters to just 1 in 25), then cycleways are going to need at least as good construction and maintenance as carriageways, or there has to be greater enforcement on carriageways to get the 1 in 4 knowingly-close-passing motorists to stop or be stopped. It could make excellent TV to get to the absurdities in government actions which are stopping those from happening.
