Bicycle Austin forum

tomwald

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From: 78722

Registered: 2008-05-27

Posts: 290

New sharrows

The following links to a video featuring Nathan Wilkes:
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/110209sh … 02522.html

City installs 'sharrows' as part of cycling, driving experiment

by SHELTON GREEN / KVUE News
Posted on November 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Updated today at 10:25 AM

Anyone driving, walking or cycling down Guadalupe between MLK and 4th Street Monday may have seen them being installed and wondered what they were.

City employees from the Austin Public Works Department spent the better part of Monday installing 13, 3x2-foot symbols of a man on a bicycle into traffic lanes called sharrows.

The lanes are to be shared between cars and cyclists, but neither the city of Austin nor the University of Texas Center for Transportation Research will go into the details of how they're supposed to work because the sharrows are part of a nationwide experiment.

The U.S. Department of Transportation chose Austin as one of six cities across the country to try out the sharrows to see if drivers and cyclists can figure out on their own how they work.  The City of Austin and UT have installed cameras in strategic areas around the sharrows to collect video to be shared with the federal government to see whether or not the sharrows are working.

"This device was first used in San Francisco and it's part of a research project and ongoing data collection to see how these devices function in the field," said Jason Wilkes an employee with the City of Austin's Public Works Department.

Seventy sharrows are expected to be installed across the city by the end of the week according to Wilkes.

"We put 16 in today, it was our first day working. We're putting them in on Guadalupe, Lavaca, on Dean Keeton next to the lanes that we already put in earlier this year and then up on 51st Street," said Wilkes.

The sharrows are just one of four bicycle safety improvements the City of Austin is spending $97,000 on in the next six months.

The sharrow experiment has also expanded to an intradepartmental experiment whereby staff will share names with each other, hence "Jason Wilkes", to act as borg-like creatures advancing better mixing of bicycles and motor vehicles.