Peter Rosenfeld
Fri, 13 Feb 2004 07:22:46 -0800
The Bicycle Coalition has the position that the door-zone bike lanes (where a bicyclists riding in the middle of the bike lane will be hit by the opening car doors of parallel parked cars) are fine as is. See their position paper http://www.bicyclecoalition.org/bikelanes.html
They maintain this position in spite of statistics and incidences illuminating this danger, the most notorious being that of a bicyclist killed in Boston as a result of being doored in this sort of lane. This has made it difficult in trying to get the city to reevaluate these dangerous facilities. Experienced bicyclists of course ignore these lanes and ride in a safe position. Other cities have recognized that dooring is a major problem and will not put in such bike lanes. In fact, they recognize that there is a significant problem with novice bicyclists riding too close to parked cars and, rather than encourage them to ride close to parked cars as Philadelphia is doing, have been trying to develop solutions too encourage inexperienced bicyclists to ride further out. Philadelphia incorrectly applied one of these methods on Delaware Ave., basically painting shared lane markings on a high-speed road in the gutter rather than out in the lane. San Francisco has just released its "Shared Lane Pavement Marking Report", an examination of the effects of markings that try to get bicyclists to ride four feet away from parked cars and out further in the travel lane. They found that the "bike & chevron" design significantly increased the distance of bicyclists from parked cars, increased the distance of passing cars from the bicyclists (although, I suspect, this was simple due to the bicyclists riding further out), and reduced wrong-way and sidewalk riding. There was no impact on aggression of the passing cars toward the bicyclists, although they said that was because there was insignificance observations of this behavior in any of the cases. I personally feel that direct education is best, rather than "education by paint". But for those of you interested in the paint approach, I recommend reading the report. http://www.bicycle.sfgov.org/site/dptbike_index.asp?id=22747 -Peter Rosenfeld ---- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the list named "bike." To subscribe or unsubscribe or for archive information, see <http://www.purple.com/list.html>.