661-Pete wrote:How difficult is it to persuade - even: to 'educate' - cyclists to slow to walking pace when passing a pedestrian - or when they cannot see if a pedestrian is ahead?
And at other times when the path is clear, to be allowed to proceed at normal cycling speeds?
That's what I do - and what I guess most cyclists on this forum do.
Well, with the qualifiers "slow to fast walking pace when passing a pedestrian close (within 2m, say)", it's what I do.
I don't think we know how difficult it is to educate cyclists to do that. No-one much seems to be trying. I'm not sure it's covered in Bikeability (any instructors reading this?) and local government reaches straight for bans and other stupid discouragements like this 5mph nonsense which means some will just ignore the whole sign. There's no "road safety" funding for it at the minute because it causes few injuries of mostly low-severity and so there are bigger bang-per-buck options at the moment, even within cycling (discouraging motorists from killing cyclists, for example).
A bit more context: this cycleway is 1300m long and together with 100m of roadside cycleway and 200m of village street, it bypasses a similar distance of 30mph-in-theory-ha-ha village spine road and replaces the previous 2000m on-road cycle route (which detoured off the speeding road as much as possible). There are no signs for the end of the 5mph limit either, so anyone obeying them should in theory be wobbling along until they passed an on-road repeater, 600m northbound (North Wootton is not fully street-lit IIRC) or 900m away southbound (change of limit between South Wootton and North Lynn).
(edited after Vorpal's post below reminded me that slowing to actual walking pace means you logically cannot overtake a pedestrian)