That’s definitely one of the worst crossings on one of the worst roads in town. This road has been built in the 1960’s when people were fully committed to the “autogerechte Stadt” (car-righteous city). Even with the current budget and a green (and more importantly cycling) senator for traffic and mobility transition you can’t fix 70 years of missdevelopment in 5 years. But we are working on it.

3km to the west, the street now looks like this. On the Reeperbahn, 1.5km to the west they also converted 2 of the four car lanes into bicylce lanes, which also will be made permanent now.

In the other direction, the (more or less) parallel Mönckebergstraße is already closed for cars (except busses and taxis), and the even more parallel Steinstraße is due for a full reconstruction this year, after which it will also be closed for personal cars.

It’s getting better slowly but steadily. The biggest problem I see, is that there are often segments with great bicycle infrastructure that end abruptly without any useful transition from and to the old, shitty infrastructure. For example, this is the road leading towards the new bike lane on the Reeperbahn (see above). There is not even a shitty bike path there, you have to either illegally use the pavement, or the 4th lane of the 5 lane monstrosity you see in 5714s photo.

Spending twice as much money on walking and cycling infrastructure as on car infrastructure isn’t too bad, especially when you consider that roads for cars cost 20x more per km than roads for bikes. Hamburg for sure isn’t a paradise for cyclists, and they still build a fair share of stupid infrastructure, but it’s already gotten a lot better than 10 or 20 years ago.