Click on the photo below to get a better view. It is a cylindrical panorama assembled from four photos: Hillside Road, at the right, is at a right angle to Routes 4-225 (the Great Road) at the left. The Narrow Gauge Rail Trail runs from front to rear in the photo, alongside Hillside Road and (at the rear) Bacon Street. (Google map of the location)
Panorama — Trail at Route 4-225 and Hillside Road, Bedford, Massachusetts, USA
There are heavy, steel gates across the trail at either side of Route 4-225, so bicyclists must thread through narrow openings. Someone has posted a sign, “Walk bikes in crosswalk for your own safety.”
Is walking really safer? My take is that it depends on who you are. If your bike-handling skills arelacking, probably so, because you will be able to pay more attention to the traffic in the dross street.
If your bike-handling skills are good: that is, if you can slow nearly to a stop without losing your balance, look around for traffic, and accelerate smartly, riding is going to be safer, because it is faster, and you are more maneuverable riding the bicycle than walking next to it.
In either case, the bicycle will be broadside to the traffic as you cross in the crosswalk, much harder for an errant motorist to avoid than a pedestrian without a bicycle.
My own preference is to avoid using the path here entirely, entering the intersection as a bicycle driver, on the street so that I do not have to look behind myself for turning traffic. Car-bike collisions are common when motorists turn in front of bicyclists on paths which run alongside roads.
As to those steel gates: well, they’ll slow down people who see them, and only cause a crash occasionally if someone colides with a post threading through a narrow gap. There are better ways to slow bicycle traffic where a path approaches a street, for example