For a week, cyclists who take the avenue de Tervueren have been badly treated. The cycle path in the central berm is being repaired: it is closed between the boulevard du Souverain and the chaussée de Tervueren and no cycle alternative is offered on the avenue. Results: the cyclists end up on the right lane, among the speeding cars.
The speed is however limited to 30 km per hour, for the duration of the work (two weeks in total), but the measure is obviously not respected, despite checks carried out last weekend.
“It is extremely dangerousdeplores Louis De Block, of the ASBL Cyclistes aux Quotidiens. We have seen mothers with cargo bikes, middle schoolers going to college, people coming home from work who are perplexed. They look for other solutions, but there are none: there is no parallel street“.
Avenue de Tervueren has three traffic lanes at this location. Wouldn’t it therefore have been necessary to sacrifice one to protect cyclists?
The independent site coordination committee, competent to validate the organization of traffic during the works, did not see fit to do so.
At the Office of the Regional Minister for Mobility, we do not hesitate to speak of an error: “We regret that the STOP principle (we protect the weakest user first, editor’s note) was not respected“.
A question remains unanswered: shouldn’t the Mayor of Woluwé-Saint-Pierre, in the name of the safety of cyclists on his territory, intervene even if it is a regional road? Benoît Cerexhe does not think so: “From the moment the cars respect the speed of 30 km/h there is no problem, this is the reason why I will ask my police to continue to make a series of checks. The alternative would have been to block a whole strip of traffic for cyclists, but that posed another concern in relation to perpendicular roads and parking spaces. So that raised other questions in terms of security.“. The construction site must be held until the end of the week.