A newly marked cycling lane on a road in the Helderberg area, installed at municipal expense and marked with the standard green surface treatment and bicycle iconography at regular intervals, was in full operation as a designated cycling route for a period of approximately seventy-two hours before the first Ford Ranger was parked in it and has since been functioning primarily as a supplementary parking facility for large bakkies, a position from which no amount of iconography has been able to dislodge it.
The lane is three hundred and forty metres long, runs along a commercial road with a demand for short-stay parking that exceeds the available formal bays and is, from the perspective of a person needing to park a Ford Ranger briefly while collecting something from a hardware store, perfectly sized for the purpose. The bicycle symbols at two-metre intervals are understood by those parking in the lane to be decorative or advisory rather than operational, a reading that has been consistent across all users since the seventy-two hour mark.
“I know it’s a cycling lane,” said one driver, a contractor who parks in it daily and who raised the subject before it was raised with him. “I’m in it for ten minutes maximum. I’m not blocking anyone, there’s no one cycling here. If there were cyclists I would not park here.” The theoretical cyclist who might one day use the lane has become the primary figure in this argument, invoked by everyone and present in practice very rarely, which each side of the debate has used as evidence for their position.
Two cyclists who do use the route and who have been navigating around parked vehicles since the lane opened describe the experience as “not ideal” and “sort of defeating the purpose” and have submitted this view to the municipality. The municipality has responded that parking in a marked cycling lane is a traffic violation. The municipality has not stationed anyone at the lane to enforce this. The Ford Rangers continue.
A road cyclist who has ridden the route several times has taken to making a small performance of navigating around each parked vehicle, swinging wide with exaggerated care, which expresses his feelings about the situation without requiring words and which the drivers, where present, observe with expressions ranging from mild guilt to mild indifference. He considers this adequate. He is not sure it is adequate.