Having a bell on your cycle helps a lot with this - just give it a ring a few times before overtaking people on a combined cycle/foot path and they will generally (although not always) try and do the sensible thing.
In my own experience I was somewhat surprised to find that using a bell actually works a lot better than saying "Excuse me please".
Also, some pedestrians will do intentionally stupid things when encountering a cyclist on a cycle path, but fortunately them seem pretty rare and far less common than cyclists who do stupid things.
I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.
> I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.
As a cyclist, I don't feel like it works very well. About 50% of the time the pedestrian startles and dodges when they hear you say it. In about 50% of those cases, the direction they dodge is to the left. And this is on the bike path where pedestrians are presumably accustomed to and expecting bicycle traffic.
I still do it for the sake of courtesy (and the hope that it will eventually become a common and well-understood practice), but I don't rely on it and give pedestrians as wide a berth as possible as well.
Single pedestrians/runners are almost never a problem. Even couples are OK. What can be risky is when you have a group of 3, 4 or more - they tend to be focusing more on each other than their environment and when they get startled they will often all jump in different directions.
[NB This isn't a serious problem, but I do spend a reasonable amount of time on cycle paths trying to co-exist with other path users on civilised terms!]
In my own experience I was somewhat surprised to find that using a bell actually works a lot better than saying "Excuse me please".
Also, some pedestrians will do intentionally stupid things when encountering a cyclist on a cycle path, but fortunately them seem pretty rare and far less common than cyclists who do stupid things.