BIKE: Fwd: Curb Island Meeting @ Gullett

[Mike Dahmus]

This one sentence of Lane's is possibly the best summation of the issue 
I've seen up to this point:

"The lesson here is, if you're going to channelize traffic, you can't 
put obstacles in the channels."

I hope we can remember this one in the future, since it's something that 
99% of us can agree upon, whether or not we support bike lanes in general.

Other key points from his summary:

"Some residents complained that cyclists ride on or very close to the 
white stripe separating the driving lane from the parking lane, which 
they felt was more dangerous now that the car lanes are narrower. While 
this may be true, this is expected behavior for cyclists trying to avoid 
obstacles in the parking lane where they are expected to ride."

This is the key reason, in my opinion, why even those who think bike 
lanes are irrelevant should have opposed this plan. The appearance (to 
motorists) that cyclists are being unreasonable obstructionists to 
traffic is very damaging to cyclists in the long-run, politically speaking.

While I'm quite comfortable asserting my right-of-way by signalling, 
going out to the middle of the travel lane, passing the parked car, and 
returning to the parking lane; the political damage is impossible to 
mitigate, since to the uninformed motorist, it looks like I went out 
into the lane for no good reason (the concept of the 'door zone' is 
foreign to these folks, in my experience).

Prouder Every Day That I Voted Against This,
MD