Quick survey

Under the cut I'll explain this, but before you go there, decide on the answer to these questions:

If you heard the phrase The black ladies'/lady's bicycle, so you didn't have spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither

If you heard the phrase The ladies'/lady's black bicycle, again without spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither

http://www.jejamescycles.co.uk/ 

Once again, an argument broke out over a linguistic issue. A friend of mine is a retired policeman, and in the context of filling in a form about the aforementioned bike, said that you would have to write the first (black lady's bicycle) if the woman herself was black, and the second if her skin colour was unspecified but the colour of the bike was black. He said that there was no optionality here, and that those were the only possibly meanings of the phrases. In other words, he would answer b for the first, and a for the second.

I say differently. I countered that the second one is not very natural at all, but if it means anything it can only be a (as he said), whereas the first phrase is the more natural in both contexts (ie I'd answer c and d for the first and second respectively). He claimed that this is a generational thing. I claimed it was a confusion between striving for maximum clarity at the expense of natural English (sometimes necessary in official paperwork) and describing how language is used by people speaking naturally. The phenomenon of the order of adjectives and other modifiers in a noun phrase is well described, and follows surprisingly regular patterns (to do with things like inherent properties). Here is the link to scholarly articles on the topic, and here is the link to non-technical explanations - choose wisely.

Of course, in a filling-in-a-form situation, if people could only spell properly there'd be no issue, but perhaps we ought to sort this out. So please, let me know: what would you answer to the two questions above, and (roughly) how old are you?