The situation

This is something I encountered mapping bike infrastructure in the Austrian town of Neuhofen an der Krems: what one might assume is a continuation of a shared bike/pedestrian path over a pretty unimportant side road is actually a legal trap for cyclists and people walking. View it on Mapillary and look closely: a sign indicates that the cycling/walking path ends, only for it to continue right after the crossing. This means that pedestrians and cyclists no longer have right of way and have to yield to cars coming out of the residential road.

A safety nightmare

It is unfortunately a bit hard to make out using imagery, but the sight lines at this crossing are horrible. Not only is it basically impossible for cars from the south to see anyone cycling by before it’s too late, it’s also pretty much impossible to see any cars coming as a cyclist, even when slowing down. This is exactly the sort of situation one should avoid as a planner, but it is strikingly obvious that the bike path here was just an afterthought.

Legal trouble

Intersections like this are common all over (Upper) Austria and often “solved” by applying this “interrupted cycle path” treatment. This means that if a cyclist and car were to collide here, the cyclist (person far more likely to die) would have to be the one explaining why they didn’t yield, and not the car driver (person driving a multiple-ton death machine) - just adding insult to (literal) injury. This is especially bitter because the bike path connects a fairly sizeable (by Austrian standards) part of town with the town center, while the side road only serves a handful of houses.

What should be done

Since the road + bike path is entirely surrounded by private property, finding a realistic solution for this issue is hard, since it is something that would’ve had to have been avoided in initial construction (a long time ago). Obviously, I think that cyclists should at least have right of way here, considering the importance of this connection. This would also give drivers an incentive to pay more attention, as they should be doing near bike infrastructure. In regards to making this intersection measurably safer, the only real solution I could imagine is to remove the grass median between bike path and road in the area of the intersection and add a kink to the bike path, in order to make cyclists and pedestrians more visible. This is tough to afford for towns like this, but money invested in safety is very well worth it.

Thank you for reading this arguably somewhat OSM-unrelated diary entry! I need some space to vent, and since I mapped this recently, I thought I’d use the opportunity! :-)