Prague 8 Calls the New Zenklova Cycle Lane Dangerous, and Says It Never Got the Chance to Object

Prague 8 has come out against a cycle lane being marked out on Zenklova, the main street through Libeň, at the Vychovatelna tram stop. Both the transport commission of the district council and Martin Jedlička, the councillor for transport, say the lane is unsafe where it is being put. The signage was set by the roads and railways department of Prague City Hall, and the city's road administration TSK has already started installing it.

The district's announcement, published on 23 September, makes two separate complaints. One is about the design. The other is about how the design reached the street.

A lane that stops between two lanes of moving traffic

Zenklova at Vychovatelna is a místní komunikace I. třídy — the top class of city-managed street — and the district puts the traffic on it at 13,800 vehicles a day in one direction, measured at the point where the lane is going in. The commission's objection is that a painted lane on a road of that intensity is dangerous in itself. Jedlička's is more specific: the lane has no continuation at either end.

"The new cycle lane is being marked on a first-class local road with very heavy traffic, which we generally consider dangerous. On top of that it ends between two traffic lanes, with nothing following on,"

Martin Jedlička, councillor for transport, Prague 8

His argument is not that cyclists should not be on Zenklova. It is that a short painted strip tells them they are protected when they are not:

"We are afraid that such a solution may give cyclists the impression of safe infrastructure and lead them into a difficult situation in which they will be going downhill at high speed between two cars. The cycle lane may therefore lead to a disproportionate increase in the risk of accidents,"

Martin Jedlička

Zenklova falls towards Libeň from the Vychovatelna junction, which is what the downhill in that sentence refers to. The district offers a precedent for the general risk rather than for this stretch: the collision two years ago at Ústecká and K Ládví, a few kilometres north, in which a cyclist was killed by a lorry.

The procedural complaint is the sharper one

Traffic signage in Czechia is set through an opatření obecné povahy — a general-measure procedure with a published draft, a comment window, and a defined set of bodies entitled to a position. That window is the district's one formal lever over a street it does not itself administer.

Prague 8 says the inbound lane was not in the draft it received.

"There was a problem in the whole process as well, in that the proposed cycle lane towards the centre was not part of the draft general measure but appeared only among the comments. It was therefore not possible to include the position of the Prague 8 district. I want to believe that this procedure is mere oversight and not an intention to get around Prague 8's position,"

Martin Jedlička

The district went back to the city hall department twice afterwards, with two successive requests that the proposal be reconsidered. Neither was granted, and the markings went ahead.

What the announcement does not contain

This is the district's account, issued by the district. It does not carry the city hall department's reasoning for the lane, TSK's, or any response to the claim that the inbound section skipped the consultation stage. Nor does it say what Prague 8 intends to do next now that both requests have been refused and the paint is going down — whether it will challenge the measure formally or simply put its objection on the record.

What it does establish is that a piece of cycle infrastructure is being built in Libeň over the written objection of the district it runs through, and that the district says it was never asked.