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Well, I spent a week (part of it on bike) in Chicago and here's what I learned.
1) beautiful city...in the summer
2) tons of bikes everywhere
3) I loved the long Lakeshore trail, complete with a distance-marked swim channel in the lake for triathletes
4) They have sharrows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nweiw3yIyDw
The sharrows in the video above were on Clark street. Essentially you ride them for several miles along a continuing line of parallel parked cars. In a couple instances they transition back and forth from bike lanes. I'm not sure why...possibly relating to the lane width.
The problem was that most of the bicyclists I saw tended to ride on the right side of the sharrow marking, along the right edge of the carrot top, which in many instances was still inside the door zone. I saw them doing this in bike lanes as well. It's the natural tendency to stay as far away as possible from car traffic. With that many parked cars, there is literally no way to make sure someone isn't in the car and about to open their door, so it's rather disconcerting.
I watched one guy who ran every stop light...he didn't seem in a hurry and was riding extremely slow, so after I waited for the green light, I would end up passing him on every block. He also rode literally to the right of the sharrow marks. Yikes, the poor guy is going to get plastered some day.
There were some "Yield to Bikes" signs, but I think just a couple.
Overall, a good experience. There are obviously a host of issues to consider, but the sharrows seemed to be a reasonable way to get bicyclist accustomed to riding with traffic, providing some safety from door zones in areas where bike lanes won't fit, avoiding some of the traffic treatment issues that bike lanes would need, etc.
Finally, I know experiences vary. But when I rode in a co-worker's car the first day, we were honked and cursed at several times for a variety of reasons. But riding around, taking full lanes, merging in and out, etc, on the bike, I never encountered any problems.
Fort Collins....
Spent three days in Fort Collins, CO. What a joy. We got to ride around on Fat Tire Cruisers from New Belgium (my friend's wife works there) and the brewery even lent my 6-year-old a mini Fat Tire cruiser. It was great to see packed bike racks everywhere we went, including the brewery.
I was also great (although not carlorie-consuming) to be in a town so flat!. Old Town had no hills and big wide streets. I actually rode around drinking a cup of coffee.
The brewery tour is a must if you visit. They do some amazing work in zero-waste, energy conservation and use (use of solar, captured methane, magnified skylights/sun tubes, natural heating and cooling of water with their networks of pipes), and you get to taste up to five beers for free. And if you're lucky to work at this employee-owned company, you get a free cruiser on your first anniversary with the company, and trip to Belgium on your fifth. We need a brewer in Austin like this!
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Perhaps the up and coming Austin coop brew pub, BlackStar Coop (http://www.blackstar.coop) can do this? Maybe there's a local bike manufacturer that'd be interested in partnering in some way... I'm not so involved at the moment, but I perhaps you could get in touch with Steve Yarak (or any one of the board members) to make such a suggestion. Hmmm, beer and bikes - fast becoming my two favorite things in Austin...
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Thanks for the report from Chicago.
I hadn't thought about how the placement of the sharrows can lead some to suggest that the right edge of the sharrow is safe from dooring. Do you think that could be solved by ensuring that the entire width of a sharrow is a safe zone from an infrastructure standpoint? i.e. move the sharrow to the left
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if you have the lane width, then yes. The problem is the idea of a sharrow for most right now is to put it as far right as possible, to "share" the lane....which isn't so bad, but people need to be educated to ride at least down the middle of the stencil. Same thing for bike lanes. Saw a guy just today riding in the far right of a bike lane right through a door zone.
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