The cycle lane on Duffield Road is unusable around 3pm each day as cars gather to pick up children from the school. Cars park up with drivers still inside (reading papers, using phones) for up to half an hour before the school finishes. The photos show the extent of the problem. As all the parked cars fill the cycle lane, any cyclists are forced towards the middle of the road and the overall effect isn’t encouraging students / parents / teachers to cycle to school.
The local councillors are aware of the problem but there seems to be little that can be done as the cars are legally “picking up or setting down” rather than “parking” even though any reasonable person would assume being stopped for 15-30 minutes counts as parking!
Difficult to know what can be done when the cycle lane is essentially just the side of the road.
On mainland western europe which has much better cycling provision, I would say 90% of cycle lanes are on the pavement and raised up from the road. In the places which fall under the 10% of cycle lanes which are just the side of the road (mostly due to an areas with not enough pavement width) then unfortunately you get veichles parking up, or dropping loads off for business use in the cycle lanes there too. 🙁
In an ideal world all cycling lanes would be raised up from the road, surfaced accordingly and you wouldnt have the pothole problems where the cyclist enters the road to avoid them.
http://www.bikeradar.com/beginners/gear/article/ban-cars-school-run-49230/
http://www.monbiot.com/2017/03/05/car-sick/