When cycling east-west or vice versa I've found going up onto the flyover a much, much safer option.
I've only ever used the Bow Flyover on FNRttCs, and even at gone 1am, it's still pretty busy, and I always feel the need to hit it at ludicrous speed, so that I'm better in the flow of traffic.
One of my colleagues regularly cycles over it on his commute (and he's a slower and less confident cyclist than me), a few years ago he was side-swiped by the rear of a bendy bus on the roundabout, destroying the thankfully unoccupied child seat on the back of his bike, so he views the flyover as a safer alternative. Personally I'd be looking for a better route to these two possibilities, but I don't know the area, and he says that there's really no practical usable alternative.
The Cycle Superhighway's seem to have largely involved an expensive process of applying vast amounts of blue paint to the roads (often as others have said, first removing existing cycle lane markings). It seems like it would have been far better if a few of the truly horrible junctions that some of the CSs either cross or tortuously avoid (like E&C) had had some of that cash spent on them instead, with some real improvements made to the junctions to help favour cyclists over motorised vehicles, but that doesn't seem to be a likely occurrence under the current regime.
It would be nice if sometimes something significant was done without requiring fatalities to occur on junctions first, but events like this recent one seem to be required before anything is considered, and even then nothing may come of it (look at Blackfriars for an example of that).
The Met are still looking for
witnesses.
