Sharrows are a sham solution for bike lanesThese faux-lanes for bikes are ambiguous and do little more than enable politicians to claim more bike miles. Here's a better solution.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sharrows: The inferior non-solution
Cycle-tracks -- putting bikes at the curb, protected from traffic by parked cars -- are much better. Why should bikes be put between the cars moving at speed and doors flying open on the drivers' side of parked cars?
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3 comments:
That is unfair.
It is misleading and comes from a polemic woefully misinformed.
The writer looks to Portland as one of the "great bicycle-friendly cities of the world." It so happens that Portland is putting down 2,000 sharrows all across the city.
Also, sharrows help keep bicyclists out of the door zone, so the premise of the criticism, that with sharrows bikes are exposed to "doors flying open on the driver's side" is untrue.
If sharrows obviously sucked, Portland wouldn't be putting down so many.
In an ideal universe, it is possible that Seattle, Portland, even Salem would like more cycletracks. But given present realities and funding sources, cycletracks are not realistic for most places. Moreover, nothing prevents a street marked in sharrows five years or ten years later to get a cycletrack.
In the meantime, sharrows are not a sham. Instead, they are an excellent temporary measure and signal as we transition to a better, more rational mix of traffic.
I may have confused things by not more clearly distinguishing _my_ comment (about bike lanes being on the wrong side of things by being on the traffic side of parked cars) and his comment about sharrows.
Either way, we can certainly agree that sharrows are proliferating; we may also be able to agree that not everything done in the name of progress turns out to be such. In my experience, half-measures installed are more likely to be used as reasons not to take proper, full measures that were put off. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.
(Thanks for the clarification re: lanes vs sharrows)
It's true that modest and partial solutions will sometimes be used to stall better solutions.
But here in Salem the initial application of sharrows doesn't always fit that narrative of partial solutions and stalling.
The sharrows that will be going down on Chemeketa NE and Rosemont Avenue NW aren't in lieu of something else. On the contrary, they are baby steps towards a bicycle boulevard. Further improvements would not remove the sharrows, but instead would build on them. So this is not an instance of a partial solution possibly stalling a better, different one.
The other place where sharrows are going down, on Commercial in the downtown core, in the longer term a cycle track would indeed be preferable. Here the sharrow is a compromise measure, as a cycletrack is totally outside the universe of possibility. Hopefully the bike plan update will yield a better solution for bike traffic on Commercial. These improvements would likely remove the sharrows and supersede them. The sharrows here could become a stalling situation, as you fear. Even so, the combination of taking Commercial from 4 lanes to 3, and adding sharrows, represents an actual and significant improvement.
Sharrows are new, and while around 80 different cities in the US are using them, we don't have a complete set of data on them. It's possible that some uses turn out not so good. Some cities will also use them as an excuse not to make further progress on sustainable transportation systems. But hopefully on balance after you see them, you'll agree they're steps in the right direction.
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