Last week, Seoul City government announced that the roads along the Cheonggyecheon are going to have bicycle lanes from April to June and from September to November on every Sunday from 9 am to 6 pm. The Cheonggyecheon bike lanes of 3.8 km (from the beginning of the stream to the Cheonggye-7-Ga (청계천7가)-bridge) are going to be temporally installed once a week. A Cheonggye-7-Ga it connects with the already existing bike lanes of 2.1 km length all the way to the Sindabcheol-bridge (신답철교). This existing bike path is 1.1 m wide. The new bike lanes gets a temporal line and physical separator through traffic cones to the car roads are going to secure 1.5 to 3 m of bike path. This means that the whole Cheonggyecheon is going to be equipped with bike lanes. If this measure proves to be successful, bike lanes might be installed there permanently in the next year.
Cheonggyecheon Bike Lanes
A day after I posted this, I was actually at the area where the bike lanes exist. So here are some pictures:
I hope to see more projects which involve bike paths in the inner-city. News articles don’t mention anything concerning cars and that the roads might be totally closed for cars during these times. It’s clever that the bike lanes are on the left side of the driving direction. So they get easier attention of cars and minimize risk of accidents than they would if they cycle on the right side.
Sources and related links: Yonhap News
That’s really cool! But what do you mean with bicycling on the left side? Sorry if I’m daft, but I don’t get it, or why it’d be good.
The bike lane is on the left side of the street and so (from the view of the cycler) the cars pass you on your right the whole time. That’s good because as the driver seat is on the left side of the car in Korea, they get easier attention by car drivers. The risk of accidents is lower. At Cheongyecheon the only possibility to turn left is at bridges. To turn right into another street occurs more often. Cars park also on the right side of the street.
I hope you know understand what I meant. Sorry if I didn’t explain it well before. Everything is described from the view of the driving direction.