Back in May, we sneered at another of John Rosenbarger's signature megalomanical muddles.
Rosenbarger giveth and He taketh away; thus shall autos be glorified at the Beechwood intersection with Charlestown Road.
... Useless bicycle lanes originally marked just a few years ago, which start and end nowhere, and that never were calibrated to guide a cyclist through an auto-centric intersection, now will be rendered even less useful than garden-variety useless ... with the compounded uselessness occurring just a few blocks from Monon Street, where there'll be a brand new park not connected in any way, shape or form to any non-automotive form of transport.
The intersection reboot is complete, and last night I noticed that it includes a new, dramatic step to resolve the bicycle friendliness issue mentioned above. Previously nonsensical and disconnected bicycle lanes now are routed through the automotive cluster muck by means of a sharrows symbol painted on the street.
Like a nightmare, it all came back to me: The city official in August, whom I quite like as a human being, but have never even once seen riding a bicycle, assuring me that New Albany's way forward to status as a red hot, bike friendly town was to have sharrows everywhere instead of more costly measures to actually achieve something.
At their very best, sharrows are a component, as the excerpt below makes clear.
However, in the absence of other (better) street use reform measures, the sharrows notion is little more than propagandistic palaver. Main Street's freshly minted conceptual catastrophe is a fine example. On a street already sufficiently wide to incorporate bicycle paths amid narrowed traffic lanes, we've opted instead for a median and wider traffic lanes, which will speed traffic rather than calm it (speed limit reductions notwithstanding), thus rendering sharrows both useless and potentially dangerous to bicycling novices who don't yet share a general contempt for sharrows as a municipal cop-out.
So what do we intend to do with our opportunity? Talk crap, paint symbols on the asphalt, then move on to build a dog park.
That's the New Albany way, and it's dead wrong -- at some point, probably literally.
Want to Increase Cycling? Sharrows Won’t Cut It, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)
Shared-lane stencils for bikes, a.k.a. “sharrows,” definitely have their place in a balanced and healthy street system. But these friendly reminders to drivers to share the road have their limits as a tool to boost safety and create more inviting streets for biking.
A study by the LA County Bicycle Coalition [PDF] showed that sharrows do little or nothing to encourage new people to take up cycling, the way bike lanes and cycle tracks do.
That’s why communities should not rely on sharrows when more effective interventions are called for. Unfortunately, Sam Ollinger at Bike San Diego says her city has fallen into this trap:
In the last year, San Diegans have seen the increasing number of shared-lane markings, also called “sharrows.” Sharrows are appearing everywhere: Adams Avenue, Park Boulevard, Broadway, El Cajon Boulevard, Grand Avenue, Voltaire Street, Chatsworth Boulevard, Hotel Circle South, Pacific Highway and more. However, these sharrows are being used as a cheap band-aid instead of implementing real change on our roadways that would increase the number of people riding their bicycle for transportation or recreation.
For starters, San Diego’s Bicycle Master Plan recommends sharrows on roadways that are too narrow for bike lanes. Sharrows are recommended on roads that have a minimum width of 14 feet. Bike lanes are recommended on roads that have a minimum of 15-17 feet. El Cajon Boulevard, for example, has three travel lanes in each direction – it has more than enough room for a bike lane.
So how can the City of San Diego increase the percentage of people who ride a bicycle? A recent report [pdf] from the Mineta Transportation Institute, an institute that was established by Congress to research “multimodal surface transportation policy and management issues,” concluded that in order to attract a wide segment of the population, a bicycle network’s “most fundamental attribute should be low-stress connectivity, that is, providing routes between people’s origins and destinations that do not require cyclists to use links that exceed their tolerance for traffic stress, and that do not involve an undue level of detour.”
