"Sharrows are popular because they are politically easy," and so in NA, they'll multiply like rabbits.

Psst ... it's almost Tuesday. Someone wake up the Board of Public Works.

This week at the Main Street Disprovement, Deforestation and Semi Trailer Non-Diversion Project, we're seeing the advent of sharrows. Here is a cyclist's testimonial.

Sharrows are worse than useless. True, they make car drivers understand that any marked sharrow is there to share with bikes, but the flipside of that is that it tends to confirm the widely held belief that bikes are NOT allowed anywhere else.

Current law follows the philosophy that EVERY non-freeway road whose speed limit is under 50 is open to bicycles and should be shared with them, whether it’s marked or not. Marking some of these roads with cute bicycle images only serves to make it seem like these roads are the only roads we belong on.

Cyclists have a right to ride on every (below) 50mph road. If automobile drivers don’t understand that, then they need to get off our streets.

In other words, on Main Street, in what was the single best place in the city for bicycle lanes, we've used the space to install decorative medians, which will enable traffic to move more quickly on interstate-width lanes despite comically lowered speed limits, because as we've all learned so many times, speed limits are not enforced, and even the $2 million-plus Main Street redesign still encourages speed, meaning that the heavy truck traffic the city claims is not being diverted to the Spring Street Bypass will continue to use these handy speed chutes, assuming the trucks actually return to Main Street ... upon which have been painted nice, dainty sharrows symbols 'cuz wishing will make it so.

Got all that? In short, we declare victory, get back in our municipal vehicles, and ride off to the suburbs to continue ignoring the Walkable City book on the coffee table.

Have you noticed that City Hall always backs away from any substantive roadway alterations designed to reduce speed by design? Of course, there isn't the first coherent purpose for any street grid reforms that do NOT reduce speed by design ... and that's why we're likely to botch the Speck report, because City Hall conflates speed with congestion reduction, and old white voters demand to pass through town quickly. It's political, and political gonads are non-existent in this city, so you can expect more sharrows:

Basically, sharrows suck, so naturally New Albany plans more of them, so we can be "bike friendly" on the cheap.

Because as we've asked previously ...

Egg, meet face: How many different ways can we botch the Main Street Deforestation Project?

Apparently, we can do it in every possible way. But those flowers ... they'll really look nice. Until they don't.

Sharrows at Grist

Sharrows discussion at the Raleigh News & Observer