BIKE: Mostly Well-Done AusChron Article on SCB (Bury the Hatchet)

[Mike Dahmus]

Thorne wrote:

><<Why push for a [SCB] solution that . . . >>
>
>Solution to what?  I wish you guys would give it a rest already, and I mean
>that in the best spirit of
>brotherly-let's-enjoy-our-riding-and-spread-the-cycling-bug-to-the-heatherns-love.
> 
>
>The main source of the "Shoal Creek Debacle," as near as I can tell, if you
>can forgive the perspective*, is that someone thought bike lanes on the street
>would be a good idea.  I've been riding on SCB since the early 1990s.  It's
>always** been a pleasant, safe place to ride singly or in groups and a bike
>lane or two, with or without parking, wouldn't improve it.  There's no problem
>to solve on SCB, which is why for so many years so many people have been
>coming to SCB to cycle, rather than avoiding it.
>  
>
SCB is a hard route to classify - not only is it used by expert cyclists 
for training (but not for obeying stop signs), it's also used by little 
kids to go to/from Northwest Park. And many novice adult cyclists use 
this route as part of their first commute (in fact, I did -- I got back 
into cycling because a friend and I would ride down this corridor from 
the IBM area to the lake on the weekends).

As far as speed differential goes - this route is right on the edge of 
what I'd consider appropriate for bike lanes. Faster roads - definitely. 
Slower roads - usually not. Typical auto speed on this road is 35ish. 
But speed differential is just one of the issues here.

Considering the original design (parking in bike lanes):

The expert group doesn't have a lot of trouble figuring out how to ride 
safely - but they tended to piss off motorists who thought they were 
supposed to be in the bike lane most of the time -- motorists in general 
have a poor conception of how far in advance you must safely leave a 
bike lane in order to get around an obstruction (say, a parked car).

The novice adult group is going to work through the same issue as the 
expert group, but possibly becoming discouraged by the honking and 
waving that will result.

The novice child group is the real problem, though. The cars expect them 
to be in the bike lane, and the cyclists themselves are unlikely to be 
very good at looking back and merging into traffic correctly. This is 
begging for either a dooring (best-case scenario) or simply getting hit 
by a car during a last-second swing out into traffic.

Now, consider what happens with bike lanes (with no parking):

The expert group gets some convenience back - I'll admit that even today 
it's a pain in the butt to me to keep swinging out into traffic and back 
over, even though I know what I'm doing. Speed differential is not high 
enough for this to be a big safety improvement over simply riding in 
traffic, however.

The novice adult group gets a place to ride where they can gradually 
work on their obstruction navigation skills. Speed differential is 
higher than with the first group - some safety benefit may be obtained.

The novice child group gets all the benefits of the novice adult group, 
plus, most importantly: the novice child group has a very large speed 
differential - so their safety benefit is likely to be high.

FINALLY: Consider the benefit to traffic flow. In the 
parking-in-bike-lanes case, automobiles might expect that they don't 
have to worry about cyclists merging with them, but of course, they're 
frequently wrong. In the best-case scenario this means that observant 
motorists slow down to 10-15 mph for large chunks of their trip on Shoal 
Creek. That's not traffic-calming in a good sense, though; this is a 
major colllector roadway (really a minor arterial that the neighborhood 
got reclassified inappropriately) - this road is SUPPOSED to move people 
at 30 mph, not 10. Likewise, cyclists' speed is impeded by the fact that 
they must often wait for cars to pass before swinging out into traffic. 
A roadway which has relatively high volumes of cars AND bikes is the 
PERFECT place for bike lanes, simply from an efficiency perspective.

I won't even address the political ramifications of allowing parking in 
bike lanes - since Michael Bluejay has already addressed it well.

If you only consider a piece of the above, you can, like some of my UTC 
colleagues and some here, think that SCB is "fine the way it is". But 
that's not what the city engineers (or the UTC for that matter) should 
be doing - this road has a wider set of users than most in town, and all 
the existing plan does is support automobile traffic to the exclusion of 
the high volumes of cyclists currently using the facility.

- MD