The highway to HAI-hell is paved
I am not sure, but it seems that it is forbidden to use a bike on major roads here in Japan. This may get a bit problematic in particular if the bike-lane layout is unfortunate as above, where it is hard to understand why the bus stop had to be made in such a way that the sidewalk got completely squeezed – especially given the fact that if a bus stops it occupies anyways half of the red roadway. It is actually quite easyy to get run over by a bike.
I found an even worse sidewalk/bikelane layout on a trip to the long penninsula which sits in front of Fukuoka (please see map for details). The biketrip there was intended as a refuge into nature – in particular I wanted to have a look at the open sea. But the trip turned out differently -the road to the penninsula’s tip was completely jammed due to heavy excursion traffic, the sidewalk very small and the sidewalk/street complex concealed with fences on both sides so that there was no way to leave the street. Given the heat (no shade) and the smell of the exhausts the biketrip became rather nightmarish.
So instead of having a look at the sea, I took the first exit of the road, which is the seaside park uminonakamichi and visited Marine World instead, which holds a shark (=HAI in german) basin. There was actually a diver in the basin and one wonders what makes people go in there voluntarily.
Some images of the shark basin at Uminonakamichi after the more
