Does anyone know the official line on whether bikes are allowed on roads tagged highway=trunk, or even highway=motorway, in Albania?
A couple of cycle.travel users have raised this. Currently I default to no bikes on both (which is c.t’s default for mainland Europe, though there are several exceptions). But I can’t actually find any documentation in the usual places on the wiki, and there’s nothing conclusive online one way or the other.
Certainly there are somelocations where forbidding bikes leads to a very long detour. I did have a look at one Well-Known Proprietary Street Imagery Source out of interest; not only were there no “bikes forbidden” signs, the first place I looked had a horse and cart turning onto the highway=motorway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Generally this is the sort of thing that would be regulated in a highway code. So I did some rummaging, and after all the AI generated/machine translated nonsense for tourists renting cars, I eventually found the actual road law (link is to a pdf).
In article 174 there is the following:
The norms of this article and of article 174 are applied to vehicles that circulate on highways, on main interurban roads and on other roads that have structural characteristics similar to them […]
The circulation of the following vehicles on the highways and roads indicated in point 1 is prohibited:
a) carts, pedal vehicles, mopeds, […]
In the original Albanian this is mjetet me pedal. Input from an Albanian speaker would be helpful as I Google translated, but I would reckon that pedal vehicles is meant to include bicycles, tricycles etc.
The norms of this article and of article 174 apply to vehicles that circulate on highways, in main interurban roads and other roads that have similar structural characteristics with them, determined by the instruction of the ministry that covers the relevant activity, with the proposal of the road owner entity, as well as indicated by start and finish signals.
So I guess the issue is whether a particular road has been designated as such “by the instruction of the ministry that covers the relevant activity” and “indicated by start and finish sign[al]s”. It would be nice if there were a 1:1 mapping between (say) highway=motorway and this. I suspect there may not be - I’ll do some more digging - but my inclination right now is to allow bikes on highway=trunk in Albania.
