I'm glad to hear that you weren't too badly injured, Eire. I thought about mentioning in my little rant above that bike lanes that cause you to ride on the wrong side of the road are the worst of the lot. They intensify all of the problems that I described above.

Patrick said above that he "feels very safe" cycling on the bike paths (EDIT: see his clarification of this point below). This is why the engineers build them I think - because it makes people feel safer. Whether or not they are safer is an entirely separate matter, and I'm far from being convinced. Part of the research that I do (I'm a post-doc researcher at a university) is related to risk perception and the inherent biases people have in their judgments of risk. Maybe I should start a new research project on bike path risk perception versus objective risk levels.