Re: [Ebbc-Talk] In America's 'Most Bikeable' Cities, Bike Lanes Rule : NPR

As usual, the devil is in the details, especially at intersections.

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Len Conly <[email protected]> wrote:

>  In America's 'Most Bikeable' Cities,Bike Lanes Rule : NPR
>
> Long Beach, CA has built some parking-separated cycle tracks which I
> believe provide space for both the bike lane and a door zone.  The door
> zone space is marked with diagonal hash marks, although I think the plan is
> to build something like a sidewalk in the door zone.  I'll try to find some
> pictures of the street.  I believe they did this with freeway arterials
> that connect with the Long Beach Freeway (2nd Ave and Pacific?) which were
> 4 lane one way streets.
>
> On May 19, 2012, at 7:32 AM, Brit Harvey wrote:
>
>  I rode on a couple of "parking-separated cycle tracks" in Paris. They did
>> not make me feel safe. People getting out of cars constantly cross your
>> "track" and sometimes unload packages, babies, etc. into the "track",
>> since
>> it is safer than the car side. Getting doored from the left side is a risk
>> unless the "track" is quite wide. Pedestrians cross mid-block, slipping
>> between cars and are hard to see. The bicyclist is trapped in the narrow
>> "track" with little room for evasive actions. There are commonly large
>> street trees immeidately adjacent to the "track", which along with parked
>> cars, make it likely that a falling bicyclist will hit a fixed object. The
>> car parking has to end well before any cross-streets or the bicyclists
>> will
>> be dealing with impaired sight lines for both seeing and being seen by
>> turning vehicles. I only noticed two of these "tracks" in Paris in 1999. I
>> don't know whether they were experiments, whether they still exist, or
>> whether there are more of them now. I do know that I would rather ride
>> with
>> the motor vehicle traffic than in one of these "tracks".
>>
>> Brit Harvey
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected]**org<[email protected]>
>> [mailto:ebbc-talk-bounces@**lists.ebbc.org<[email protected]>]
>> On Behalf Of Len Conly
>> Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 7:32 PM
>> To: [email protected]
>> Subject: [Ebbc-Talk] In America's 'Most Bikeable' Cities,Bike Lanes Rule :
>> NPR
>>
>>  Lerner says that despite its hilly geography, San Francisco tied
>>> with Portland on the strength of its extensive network of bike lanes.
>>>
>>>
>>> New York made the Top 10 list primarily for its efforts to build
>>> new, and safer, bike lanes.
>>>
>>> "For example, they have what are called parking-separated cycle
>>> tracks, where there's a barrier of parked cars between the traffic
>>> and the bikers - and that's a really great way to make bikers feel
>>> safer."
>>>
>>> As Lerner tells NPR's Melissa Block, Walk Score recently assigned a
>>> Bike Score to U.S. cities based on four criteria: the number of
>>> bike lanes and hills; the nearness of destinations; and the number
>>> of bike commuters...
>>>
>>>
>> http://www.npr.org/2012/05/18/**153029914/minneapolis-**portland-ore-top-<http://www.npr.org/2012/05/18/153029914/minneapolis-portland-ore-top->
>> bikeable-cities-list
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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