One of the reasons that the reconstructed Hereford St got cycle lanes was because the pre-quake Hereford St rebuild (featuring just a shared lane) was a nuisance for riders being stuck in amongst other slow traffic. Central Colombo St is at the top end of what I’d call comfortable traffic volumes to share (in fact, I never understand why so much traffic even bothers to crawl along there…); reducing the incentives to drive there (e.g. stopping the ability to drive from one side of town to the other along Colombo) would help improve the environment…

Colombo Street near the overbridge/Cashel Mall gives a cyclist all the fun of waiting at red lights, in a line with cars, without the protection.

There’s not enough room to ride up the side to the front, so frankly its the worst of everything. I’d take Manchester or even the one-way streets in preference to Colombo. Heck even Fitzgerald feels safer !

The Featherston St sharrow markings in Wellington were part of the original trials around NZ and it’s fair to say that the conclusion was that this site is actually far too busy to really meet the criteria for using a sharrow (in fact, I’d say that they wouldn’t fall into the acceptable range of traffic speeds and volumes given in the NZ guidelines for sharrows subsequently developed). You need to pick a site with sufficiently low traffic volumes and speeds – or change the street to create these conditions…

In saying that, most of these experiences happened in Wellington, on Featherston St, and by the Kelburn viaduct. In Christchurch the only sharrow I can think of off-hand where I regularly ride is the blocks of Colombo St around Cashel… and there, the traffic is genuinely slow enough it doesn’t seem to cause much bother.