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I'm a little surprised that right turns on red are allowed at all at bike boxes. As Allan said,
"One scenario where this could cause issues: Say a car gets to an intersection and is going to turn right, but forgets (or chooses not) to use their signal (which happens A LOT, I think we can all agree on that). They turn their head to the left to watch traffic. While their head is to the left, a bike comes up to the right of the car and plans on going straight through the intersection. There is no opening for the car to turn right when the light is red, and then the light turns green, and the car tries to turn while the cyclist goes straight. Collision. This is just one scenario, there are plenty others."
Well, what's to stop that car from looking to the left for a gap and then making that right turn on red? What are the chances they looked back to their right mirror/window for a bike approaching the bike box on their right?
I see the need for the "STOP HERE ON RED" sign but it doesn't seem to me that it does any good without a "NO TURN ON RED" as well? It's kinda like that new pedestrian signal at the Triangle. Are people supposed to stop and then proceed or wait for the signal to revert back to flashing yellow? I'm a traffic engineer and even I can't figure it out! It is a scary place to cross and I see these bike boxes setting themselves up for the same dangerous unpredictability.
My parents work for an insurance company and probably 10 years ago they sent out a memo stating it was safer to back into a spot rather than pull in forwards. The theory is that reversing in your vehicle is significantly more dangerous than driving forward. If you back into a spot first, the length of time between your view of any obstacles (e.g. children, other cars, shopping carts) and reversing into that space is just a few seconds. When backing out of a parking spot you generally approach the car (and take stock of obstacles), get in, sit down, arrange your purse/coffee, get out the keys, and shift into reverse. In that case, the time between your seeing the space you are going to back into and the action of reversing the vehicle is much longer, maybe even a few minutes.
The hope with reverse-angle parking is that the car would see the cyclist as s/he drove past and wait. That has got to be better than a car slowly backing out blindly.
I'm excited for the new parking concept. I was visiting Salt Lake last month and they have the smallest signs diagramming how to use the space. Hopefully Austin will find a better way to educate potential parkers.
> http://www.kvue.com/news/local/stories/ … e.html?npc
Wow. That was a crazy, uninformed "news" segment! Too bad they didn't figure out the faded, blue lines on Arroyo Seco were for an Austin Marathon (the City was promised they would disappear in a few weeks). And the "bike lanes" on Woodrow are not actually bike lanes (no bike pavement markings) but rather a traffic calming device meant to narrow the travel lanes and encourage peeps to drive slower (ineffective), though they do often serve as nice bike lanes when not filled with parked cars or garbage cans. What ineptitude.
It makes me really mad that they are inciting even more anti-cycling attitudes over nothing.
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