Genuine question.
Obviously the left hand side of this is supposed to be for bikes and right hand side for walkers. What puzzles me is the stretch of ribbed paving. On the bike side, the ribs are parallel with the kerb, on the walk side the ribs are transverse.
When I first started noticing these I assumed that the contractors who had implemented the design had misunderstood and got them the wrong way round. A set of ‘tram tracks’ going in the direction of travel is, at very best, scary for a cyclist becuse you fear it might catch your wheel like actual tram tracks. At worst it actually might be dangerous. Yet every example of this treatment has the ribs arranged like this so it must be deliberate. Why?
Is there some advantage to visually impaired people in having tactile paving with transverse ribs? Are the longitudinal ribs a subtle form of traffic calming – it is intended that cyclists are disconcerted? As I say, this is a genuine question.
There are plenty of examples of this in Bristol but I took this photo, funnily enough, just outside Warrington, famous in bike-blog circles, for their documentation of bad bike infrastructure.
Psychobikeology 