Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants
macwright.com
macwright.com
Some examples:
1) I suspect the "new car smell" that car buyers believe affects their judgment is purposely chosen glue (I think it's a glue) that dissipates into a gas that literally, psychiatrically impairs buyer's judgment. It's real. [edit: it's still relatively mild].
2) Stealing a person's main means of transport should be punished independently of how expensive that mode of transport is. So, the penalty for stealing a car should be based on the price of a car and the fact it was the main means of transport for that person. Same goes for bicycles, it could have been a $100 bike, but it's the main means of transport and that person is equally stranded as the driver without it. For this reason, being a bike thief stealing 10 bicycles could mean a decade in jail, if laws were different. Who would steal bikes then?
3) Enforce both car driving violations and bike driving violations, but based on lethality of the vehicle. Right now both driving a car drunk and riding a bike drunk are a DUI, which is ridiculous.
4) Legislation that privileges driving over biking harms children, because they can ride a bike starting age 8 or so, but can't drive until 16.
5) Driving is an extremely lethal activity, but AFAIK biking deaths are mostly attributable to automobiles. If you try to run someone over with a car you can be charged with (I forget the wording but more or less) "using a deadly weapon". Because that's what it is. A killing machine.
There's an additional constraint of acting negligently. If you're going 45 on a road where the speed limit is fifty and someone sprints out in front of your car, you won't be convicted of vehicular manslaughter (assuming obviously that you didn't have time to react).
Somehow I'm reading "within a few feet" as "six inches". IME bicycles are much narrower than automobiles. If it's safe to pass an automobile, it's safe to pass a cyclist while leaving at least eight feet.
If it's not safe to pass, don't pass.
This seems beside the point? Above you seemed to imply it is inherently challenging to pass a cyclist. That is only the case if one attempts to pass in inappropriate situations. Cyclists have at least as much right to the road as motorists have.
We talk so much in America about gun control, why not also car control?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
https://gizmodo.com/90-years-ago-the-los-angeles-subway-was-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Apparently LA's loss of underground subway was tied to its loss of overland subway, as well. They seem to have been the same system?
Note that "jaydriving" is not a crime.
Of course, just like everything about driving in China, the rules mean very little. It's pretty hard to enforce your rights if you're dead.
My ten-years-old experience driving there was interesting. At any given time you could expect the cars around you to do the stupidest of all possible things, completely ignoring the rules. But they'd do it slowly, and expect others to adapt...which they did.
https://www.bikecitizens.net/presumed-liability-shrinks-cycl...
If some schmuck with California's minimum $15,000 per person injury insurance disables you, what would you do? Sue them for their additional median $97,300 net worth? Which might be less than $10,000 liquidated? That is you'd expect to get, somewhere between $25,000 and $112,300, for your lifetime injury. Perfect enforcement with 100% liability legal system would get you $25,000-$112,300 in my estimate, for the rest of your life. If you're permanently disabled, it's peanuts.
It's a shitty outcome. The problem is in part, clearly, that people are really poor.
And then suppose it's a totally recoverable injury. Out of $112,300 you recover $25,000, realistically, and the driver is bankrupted. You could put a whole family on the street. It's not Europe, they will go on the street! Is that justice? They're all completely broke dude. They have nothing besides their car.
People are living paycheck to paycheck, and you're comparing European countries where neither disability nor bankruptcy condemns you to a life of poverty. 20% of Americans claim some disability. 20% of Americans have zero or negative net worth, which is 4x the EU + UK's 5%. You have a 1 in 5 chance of getting hit by someone in their car, and recovering a maximum of $15,000, or $0 if they're uninsured.
The simplest answer is that only people who are rich enough to pay the remedies of death by vehicle accidents should drive. That can be as simple as either requiring self-insurance (i.e., you must have a net worth more comparable to death settlements, or $500k-1m), or at least an insurance that covers that kind of injury (which poor would not be able to afford). I don't think that sounds like justice either, think how disruptive it would be if you had to be that rich to drive? It would certainly impact rich people too, because they'd be underwriting their nannies, cooks and, checking my notes, teachers, firemen, nurses, etc. to get to work.
It's pretty crazy too, the degree of wrong in the comments to this. At least bring some facts to this discussion. People are just trying to survive, of course they are going to go with the cheapest possible lowest coverage insurance. On top of that, "about 15% of California drivers have no insurance, according to the Insurance Research Council." (1) Like what do you think those people with negative net worth (20% of Americans) are doing? Buying $2,000/yr auto insurance policies? It boggles the mind.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/state/californi...
The minimums might get thrown around a lot to convince you to help sell you under-insured insurance coverage.
But you always do need to worry about completely uninsured motorists.
Depending on your province, it’s gotten a lot harder to claim much for soft injuries or even income replacement if you’re injured in an MVA.
That is highly dependent on the urban area. I would bet that there are lots of poor folks that use cars in places like LA or Houston or Miami.
This is the duuuummmbest shit I have ever heard, and reeks of someone who has no idea just how large the United States is. I'm sure this works great in a tiny nation where everything you want to access is within a click or two, but there are parts of the United States where people literally have to drive an hour or more (at 60-70 mph) to get to a grocery store.
I have a friend who retired to Wolf Point, Montana. The nearest Walmart is five hours away. The only thing there is an Albertson's, which is frequently sold out of items.
My favorite thing to do with my European colleagues and friends is drive them around Texas when they arrive. Many of them quickly pick up on an expression that is common across almost all of America - "Oh, its just right down the road."
"Right down the road" in America means "its anywhere from 5-30 miles away". It doesn't mean, "its 600 meters down the street". And they all pick up on it.
Do you know what the problem with "simple" answers are? They're childish. There are no simple answers in life. Everything exists in a state of extraordinary complexity and requires significant consideration. Don't believe that? Look at how we've handled the maintenance of the National Park Service in America. One environmental disaster after another.
This is why both drivers and cyclists really should be recording things. It doesn’t prevent injuries, if it can make a huge difference afterwards.
It's kinda ironic that that's used as an example of bad cycling, and also exactly where most bike lanes are put: in the door zone of parked cars.
The only way to fight stereotypes like this is with hard evidence.
Ironically the point of this article is how this is always permitted and the sole reason sharrows exist is to point it out. Judging by your comment it isn't widely understood.
Preliminary results from a study in the United Kingdom, conducted by the University of Nottingham for the Department for Transport, show that filtering is responsible for around 5% of motorcycle Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) accidents. (Bicycle statistics are harder to locate.)
Filtering is riding on the line between lanes.
If a cyclist can't lane-split, then what are they supposed to do up a hill? If they take the entire lane drivers get annoyed, if they don't take the entire lane (and follow the common guideline of riding as close to the edge as safe and practical) then you claim they are doing the wrong thing too?
But sure it’s “perfectly safe” and even occasionally legal. Frankly the number of people defending this practice is a significant sign it’s a real problem.
And filtering to get in front in the intersection is safer for a cyclist, as one is then better seen. So no reason not to filter through stopped traffic, really. If it's a safety issue, the solution is probably to remove those making it dangerous (cars) from the streets.
The solution is to simply avoid trying to share a lane while sitting in people’s blind spots. Someone can easily get between two rows of cars turning left without realizing it and get knocked over even when the cars are doing everything correctly.
The same is true of sharing lanes even on city streets, lanes simply are not wide enough to safely share as the motorcycle or cyclist has vastly reduced visibility and may miss construction lane markings etc that unexpectedly move traffic.
[0] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liabili...
[1] https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-pedestria...
Not strictly, the driver (bestuurder) of a vehicle (anything requiring a drivers license, also mopeds) is considered a more capable participant in traffic. Pedestrians and cyclists are at the bottom of that food chain. If you hit something in the "lower classification" you have to prove you are innocent and the burden is on you completely. If the cyclist was using his phone, collect witnesses after you help the victim as you are in no way liable if you made every effort to stop and look. (e.g. in a low speed collision, assuming the cyclist made a mistake). High speed collisions are usually completely attributed to the driver as they should be aware of cyclists all the time. e.g. Not slowing down at a crossing (even one with traffic signs) is reason to forgo any rights if you hit a cyclist as you should be aware of any participant in traffic which is less capable (in the protection sense) as you are. Even if the cyclist drives though a red light as you should anticipate mistakes. You are usually liable for the 50% but it is not a given. Always go to court if you consider the cyclist made a mistake.
e: please not that in normal cases the damage is a percentage fault division to both parties, in case a pedestrian or cyclist is involved the minimum will rise to 50% for the other party to cover in case "overmacht" (force de majeure) cannot be proven which is where the "always 50%" comes from. There are however numerous cases in which this has been proven and can be used in a court of law. It will however almost never be 0% for the driver of a vehicle.
Thankfully a “prove your innocence” approach would be unconstitutional in the US.
Not in civil liability suits, which is what these rules seem to describe, only in criminal cases.
(1) Create real penalties for drivers that hit cyclists (2) get insurance agencies and drivers themselves to want safety infra so that they are no longer exposed to the risk of hitting cyclists (3) safety infra is built
What we have in the states now where more and more people are biking, and people are begging for infrastructure, but there are no changes isn't working.
Does the police actually police the cyclists, or do they just controll the cars, and let the others (pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, rollerbladers,...) deal with themselves by themselves?
Police does sometimes pick off cyclists who are on their phone and whatnot, but outside of that, it is a very self-regulating system. It's also fuelled by the society, teaching your kids how to behave as a cyclist is a very visible part of upbringing.
I remember from my brief stint in law school that our professor told us, that there is a good case to be made for changing the law from reverse burden of proof to objective liability, ie. motorist' should always be liable, no ifs, ands, or buts. The reason, he explained, is in the cases where two motorists are in an accident, a lot of resources are wasted in determining liability. Since what always happens is that one insurance company must pay and another one doesn't, and since each insurance company will on average win as many cases as they lose, it would save a lot of money and time to just declare that each driver is 50% liable and be done with it. I also seem to remember that this is how it works in New Zealand, but I could be misremembering.
In the limited experience that I have as a frequent pedestrian visitor with dedicated cycling lanes in NYC, they feel dangerous to pedestrians. Many cyclists don’t want to stop or yield to pedestrians, and left turn markings on avenues are still evolving and confuse a lot of drivers.
Cycling is well established, but the rules around road use are insane. That won’t get fixed unless someone is getting a big bill.
“Big bills” do nothing to stop drivers from breaking the laws, but go on thinking that it will change cyclists.
Since most cyclists in the US also have car insurance, our rates could be based on computing the risk of each mode of transportation. Cyclists would pay less for insurance. Make my day.
That said, when I am driving, I have absolutely no issue with people on bicycles who ride predictably and follow the rules. It's those who don't that anger me. Specifically, I'm talking about things like riding through a crosswalk, riding the wrong way, and not signaling lane changes. There's a reason you're supposed to walk your bike through a crosswalk, and not signaling when you're a ~200 lb driver + rider combo facing down vehicles weighing more than 10x and capable of going much, much faster than you is just dumb.
That doesn't mean drivers aren't dumb, too. On top of the usual traffic BS we all deal with while driving, I also see a lot of instances of drivers not taking over a bike lane when turning. Usually, in this case, this just seems to lead to a lot of "go! no, you go! no you go!" business, but it's 100% a recipe for a crash.
Well obviously if your standard of who is at fault is "the driver is always at fault", obviously 100% of collisions are going to be the fault of the driver.
With that caveat, on access-controlled highways (motorways), you’re not allowed to walk, so any pedestrian would be in the wrong for being there. That said, even there a driver would be at fault for colliding with a human (policeman, fireman, people after a car accident, and other people who might have a very good reason to be there) regardless of what that human was doing. It’s not that different from crashing into a stopped car or any other kind of obstacle. Similarly, a driver is at fault for hitting an animal.
In non-access controlled highways, the driver would be at fault if their car collided with anything, be it another car, a human, or an animal. How legal it is for a pedestrian to cross in this case depends on local laws.
So in any case, yes, the driver is responsible, although that responsibility could be shared in some cases. If the accident results from deliberate action on the part of the pedestrian, there probably would not be any consequences for the driver in any lawsuit (unless the driver was also reckless or drunk), but for insurance purposes it does not matter.
For whatever it's worth, I would agree. I am confident that most cyclist/car accidents will be the car driver's fault. Would you even be surprised, if this turns out to be genuinely the case? I wouldn't! Do you even drive a car? I do! Car drivers are shits - or at least behave exactly like them - one for the philosphers, perhaps - and I cannot fathom how anybody that drives a car could think otherwise. Have you not noticed how these people behave? (Sure, lie to us all you like - but don't lie to yourself!) Car drivers would run your kids down, and you know it, if it would save them 5 seconds - then in court they'd cry about how things are so difficult for them now they're facing prison. Because they know they'd probably get away with it.
Out of the tiny number of times an accident is the cyclist's fault, the vast majority could be avoided if the driver was paying an appropriate amount of attention - and the 6-year-old rule of thumb is a good one, I think, when it comes to gauging how much attention is appropriate - given they're driving a 1500+ kg 200+ bhp murder machine, a major design goal of which is ensuring its occupants come out unscathed from any collision.
I am confident the remainder could be dealt with on a case by case basis.
So, to your "I'm confident that..." I also say: citation needed.
No, they are claiming that they have a belief (implicitly, often, a justified belief) that X has a high probability of being true, unlike stating merely “X” which denotatively is a claim that X is true without qualification.
This is not the case with bicycles - they drive with the traffic, as a part of traffic. So I don't think this rule is very applicable to real world.
That’s what I am trying to say: with kids, even if they are nowhere in your path, you want to slow down anyway, because who knows.
This rule does applies less to adult bicyclists. For example, if there is a separate, dedicated bike lane and there is an adult bicyclist there, I will pass him. Not so with kids.
See the difference?
Seattle streets in a nutshell. As a frequent pedestrian I've lost count of the number of times a car has stopped in the middle of an intersection and frantically tried to wave me across a street. Some people are just bonkers. If you're already inside an intersection, don't yield to a pedestrian who's standing still on the sidewalk! Are people trying to get t-boned? Worse, in those situations I feel morally compelled to run across the street just so the driver will remove themselves from the dangerous situation they put themselves in for my sake. Absolutely infuriating.
Drivers blowing through crosswalks (especially unmarked crosswalks) are far more common, to the point that it's unsafe to make a mandatory stop on a two lane per side road, because that risks killing the pedestrian when a driver in the second (left) lane illegally zooms past the stopped car and hits the nearly invisible pedestrian.
In another case, a cyclist blew by my at full speed down a steep hill on the sidewalk, again coming stupidly close to an accident (for both of us) for no reason.
As a driver, I constantly see cyclists on the wrong side of the street, back and forth between the sidewalk and not, and not obeying stop signs or stop lights (let alone other rules). I’ve never even heard of one being ticketed.
I’m all for new bike lanes that are separated from traffic. But honestly before a city encourages more bike riders I really think they need to dramatically step up enforcement of traffic laws against them. If running a red light or stop sign is a $200 ticket in a car, it should be a $200 ticket on a bike. Otherwise it is just unsafe for everyone involved.
Curiously; in France many red-lights are excepted for bicycles. There's often a special, permanent "orange" signal that applies to bikes, thus they are explicitly encouraged to run the red light. If I understand well, this was in agreement with drivers, who were annoyed to wait for all the bikes to start slowly after the light turns green.
I think that if you ever try to use a bicycle in transit (I mean, seriously over a few days, not for 5 minutes), you will see that it is essentially impossible to do correctly. Sometimes you have to turn left across many lanes of fast cars, what are you supposed to do? Inevitably you take the least dangerous path.
> Sometimes you have to turn left across many lanes of fast cars, what are you supposed to do?
one of the great things about biking is that you get to pick and choose between car rules and pedestrian rules depending on which set fits the situation best. whenever I am uncomfortable making a left turn, I pull off to the right and cross the intersection like a pedestrian.
Oh, I hate that! Bikes are transit, and are not supposed to leave the transit in the middle of their way, especially not for negotiating an intersection. Bailing out of the bike and going on foot with the pedestrians does not count as "doing the correct thing", just that using the bike is impossible. Besides, it is annoying for the pedestrians.
Bike infrastructure in a lot of European cities demonstrates that it can work. American drivers are much more polite than European ones yet kill more cyclists per capita.
I don't know about American drivers, but you certainly shouldn't say e.g. Swedish and French drivers are equally impolite.
I also notice them from drivers all the time, as well. Is it stupid when a cyclist runs a stop sign? Yes. The same as a car doing it. And people are notorious for not stopping well if they are going to take a right. Such that we design for the behavior with round abouts. Car or bike.
Meanwhile, both times I've been hit, the car turned right not checking that there was a biker in the bike lane right next to them.
The GC seems to be a comment replying to a lot of sentiment in this thread which is basically "the driver is always at fault". Given what I'm sure we've all seen from cyclists (and the things I've done as a cyclist), I can confirm that this is definitely not the case.
Why? They are different crimes. Cars are faster and heavier, thus will injure someone much more when misused.
I'm receptive to this, but I doubt it would ever be implemented.
If one is driving, and a bicycle runs the red light and jumps in front of them, they’ll hard brake (at least most of the people). This means they have a very high chance of being rear-ended by the next car, and if the driver is not very experienced, then can lost control and hit other lane / objects and people at the side of the road.
As a similar example, we don’t allow untrained and unprotected people into construction sites with heavy machinery. Saying “hey, let me walk under this pile driver, it is my life on the line!” isn”t going to cut it in the US.
Now, if you prefer the penalty to differ due to the potential for injury, you need to get the politicians to change the laws so they are not the same crime, or so that the penalty scales due to some formula in the law related to the potential for injury.
Bicyclists (I am one) apparently want to have their cake and eat it too: driving all over the place (sidewalk, street, wrong way, etc) while at the same time wanting drivers to always be at fault for collisions.
As a driver, I think all roads should be closed for anyone else but cyclists. I'm a driver, you can't argue with my point, as I represent all drivers. "As an X person" is really good for discourse..
I used to cross a bridge to get to work. There was a shared pedestrian/cycle pathway, about 6 feet wide, with cycles yielding to pedestrians. I remember walking across that one time with my family, including my daughter who was about 3. This one jerk rang no bell and blew past my entire family, about a foot away, at 20+ MPH. I didn't even hear him coming from behind.
3 year olds are prone to random movements. If she had moved by a foot or two at exactly the wrong time, it would have been a very bad situation.
On the plus side, the cyclist behind the asshole (who properly rang his bell and passed us) stopped at the end of the bridge to apologize for the first guy.
Hard to justify when safety is the main argument. Yeah, $200 fine for cyclists would be a good deterrent, but maybe then it should be a $1000 or $2000 fine for a car doing the same thing [0].
If you want to argue that cyclists should face the same penalties as drivers, you have to make an argument prioritizing safety, but something like "respect for the law".
[0] Or - $200 plus points on your license. That's the way it works in many jurisdictions: the motorist rightly faces a bigger penalty even though the top-line dollar amount is the same.
2. Drivers commit as many, if not more traffic violations than cyclists—and the consequences are much greater.
3. Your opinion would almost certainly change if you had to commute by bicycle.
One time a Pizza Hut driver almost killed me. I called his boss, they didn't care.
One time an UBER DRIVER almost hit me and then proceeded to chase me because I yelled and flipped him off. I sent a photo of the license place to Uber and the local PD, nothing. Not even an acknowledgement.
The fact is that people don't care. You go on HN or Reddit and people will complain and actively encourage hitting riders. It is always the rider's fault, even if the driver broke the law. And I'm tired of it. I don't care if the rider was in the wrong, you're a lot more squishy on a bike than in a plastic housing with a motor. There's this weird dichotomy of not caring about the life or safety of someone.
The reason why I have little sympathy for these types of stories is that I witness cyclists being assholes every day I drive. Stuff like running lights and stop signs, changing lanes with no signals, riding on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in lanes with moving cars, etc etc.
I understand that in the US bike environments are really unsafe, but I don’t think that routine not obeying traffic laws or conventions is the way to go.
Just this weekend in my neighborhood, and elderly woman was murdered by a driver hooking a left turn while she was in a crosswalk. Same neighborhood, a homeowner had a driver crash into her home for the second time in three months!
Driving culture in the US is undisciplined and low-skilled. The requirements for earning a license are far too low in every state.
My city seems dedicated to making the roads as deadly as possible. Rather than having bicycles go down a parallel road, they gave them a bike lane on the main road. Thing is, there is no real benefit to bicyclists to be on that road versus a parallel road. I wouldn't bike on that road for pay. The city also added speed bumps. So idiot drivers drive into the bike lane to go around the bumps. The same city has changed left + straight lanes to be left only and right only lanes to be right + straight. This has the effect of "no turn on red" which should reduce danger to pedestrians... but the lanes don't always line up, sometimes there are near collisions because people think they are in the straight lane or because people turning an unprotected left in the opposing traffic think they are in a turn lane (and indicators are optional).
I could rant on for pages.
I don't know the solution. I now drive first for my own safety, second to limit my own liability, and third for the safety of others. I equate that with giving up. But on one side are idiots that think the road should be built just for them and on the other side are well-meaning idiots that remove the double yellow lines because drivers slow down. One thing I do know is that pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers should be kept physically separate wherever possible.
Also, generally speaking, Americans do not like things that add perceived barriers to their personal freedom and independence, so any proposal to make it more difficult to get a license would probably be unpopular.
Then consider injuries caused by breaking the law on the road. Bikes breaking the law cause few, speeding cars cause many.
Dismissing the regular lawbreaking of cars doesn’t seem rational. Just because you don’t like the way bikes break the law doesn’t mean bikes breaking the law has a negative impact.
Cursory search turns this up:
> Speeding was a factor in 26% of all traffic fatalities in 2018, killing 9,378, or an average of over 25 people per day.
Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
In one sentence you managed to point directly to the dichotomy cyclists face. Car drivers: “get out of the road it’s for cars!”, pedestrians: “get off the sidewalk it’s for pedestrians!”
In many places there just isn’t safe areas for cyclists that doesn’t end up putting them in conflict with other users of streets.
One thing that’s hard on a bicycle is to keep your cool after a collision or near miss. You end up with so much adrenaline pumping that anger often comes.
Like others on this thread have mentioned though, getting angry at people in cars is not helpful, best case they feel bad, worst case they become angry and now have a multi-ton weapon on their side.
My complaint is about cyclists entering a lane with a car which is super dangerous. Just as it would be for a car to enter a lane held by a cyclist.
Do you think it’s appropriate that a bike passes a car in its own lane? Do you think the law should be changed to allow this?
More frequently than cars? There are over 5 million car crashes in the US every year. 30,000+ people killed.
This is entirely situational. There are cases where it is OK and there are cases when it isn't.
There was an Uber blocking traffic on my street today and I went past them. It would be ridiculous to have to just sit behind the car until their passenger showed up, and I'm sure as hell nit gonna ride my bike into oncoming traffic
>Do you think the law should be changed to allow this?
It doesn't need to be changed. The law in my state already allows this under many circumstances
The fact that people driving 2 ton steel killing machines complain about cyclists being “assholes” when it’s overwhelmingly their killing machines that, you know, kill cyclists, pedestrians, and other people in killing machines, is a remarkable display of entitlement.
It sounds as if you think, if there is no dedicated bike lane, that bicyclists shouldn't exist.
In many places, legally, vehicles have no more right to the road than bicycles. The "road" is a shared lane for bicyclists and vehicles.
That it is dangerous is the responsibility of all to mitigate, but the multi-ton steel box has the obligation to yield.
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/90000/velka/sh...
Just like you couldn’t have two cars side by side in a lane, you can’t have a bike and a car in the same lane.
We have mixed traffic with bikes and cars on the same road, but they’re supposed to be sequential, not side by side.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
I’m on a single lane suburban road with a line of 20 cars all going 10mph. A bike rides alongside me going 20 mph in the same lane, passing me and other cars. The bike is 1-2 feet away from the side of my car.
I've lived in a place with dedicated bike infrastructure. It was amazing. We should be pushing for that.
And why are cyclists so antagonistic? Not a good look if one wants their group to be taken seriously.
And if you don't want to take a diverse group of people seriously because of some slight you have with a minority of them, you're not really interested in taking them seriously in the first place, and are just looking for excuses. Classic tactic used to neglect lots of groups one's not in. "If the millions of BLM supporters want to be taken seriously, they shouldn't have a few people among them rioting!" is another example.
Before roads were for cars they were for horse+buggies, or chariots, or other transport. Cyclists are not first-class citizens on roads and they never will be. And frankly I don't want to get stuck behind one on a road with a dramatically higher speed limit than what you can pedal at. That shit is just rude.
The amount of entitlement that seems to come from the cycling community makes it really hard for others to empathize with your situation. You can make a bad faith argument comparing yourselves to BLMers if you want, but I can see right through it.
Appreciate your sitaution as a minority among minorities and plan your moves appropriately. But thinking that cyclists should get higher priority over multi-ton cars and such you are mistaken.
> People fearing for their lives are allowed to be agitated.
Don't forget that by cycling you are choosing to bring a knife to a gunfight.
In big cities that's never a problem. Cars are stuck behind other cars.
> You can make a bad faith argument comparing
I didn't compare myself to that, only an example. If anything that's a straw man and bad faith on you..
> Don't forget that by cycling you are choosing to bring a knife to a gunfight.
It's not a fight. But you and other drivers looking at it like that is very telling, heh.
I can never understand how anyone can make this argument without seeing how it applies even harder to why bicycles shouldn't be on the road with cars going 45+ MPH (~70+ km/h).
Bicycles are closer to pedestrians than cars outside of the slowest city roads.
Also I live in New Orleans where having a few feet of very broken, ragged sidewalk due to a tree's roots bursting up through them as the pavement slowly sinks is a very common sight. Trust me you do not wanna bicycle on that shit.
Cyclists are unambiguously wrong if they cycle on the pavement. Just as cars drivers are unquestionably wrong when they are in a cycle lane. This is cycle riders doing to pedestrians exactly that they don’t want drivers to do, and this is dangerous for people who are in a more vulnerable position than they are. I have zero sympathy for riders on the pavement, I’ve had too many collisions or near misses, including with small children.
> riding in lanes with moving cars
where are they supposed to ride?
What I meant is a bike shouldn’t ride alongside a moving car in a lane but should be ahead or behind, like any vehicle.
So for me the sharrows do make a difference, since they make it feel safe to use more of the road, which makes me do it.
This again comes back to the fact that cyclists are neither pedestrians nor motorized vehicles. It isn't a surprise that they want to be treated like cyclists and not be in that binary classification. It is only hypocrisy if you use the wrong classifications. If you're really trying to understand bike safety try riding in their shoes for a month or two. You'll start to get it real fast.
Regularly watching cyclists flaunt the rules that the car driver would be cited for breaking, and never seeing a single cyclist cited for the law breaking, leaves a foul taste for cyclists in the mouths of many motorists. They don't get to run stops or red lights with impunity and without punishment.
So as long as the law says cyclists must obey the same rules car drivers are also supposed to obey, the subset of cyclists that break those rules on a regular basis do not help, in the least, the arguments to try to convince car drivers to be more respectful of cyclists.
The start should be the cyclists obeying the same rules as the cars (which would help with not pissing off numerous car drivers daily) while working the politician angle to change the rules for cyclists to something safer for cyclists (and at which point the car drivers will no longer have a way to rationalize their hatred of the cyclists as just "law breakers").
The problem is that as your parent commenter pointed out obeying these laws also pisses off drivers. Drivers get pissed off when cyclists take the full lane, and they get pissed off when cyclists come to a full stop in front of them at a stop sign. I don't run red lights and stop signs on my bike and it annoys me when people do, but I feel like the many violations drivers commit every day are just normalized because there are so many more drivers than cyclists.
We should also consider that many people have different definitions for "running a stop sign" and it isn't equally applied to cars and bikes. A roll at a stop sign is ignored for a car but "running" for a bike. I don't blow through (that's irresponsible), but I do roll, per the given reasons above (funny enough I never roll when driving).
Every cyclist I know has at least one story of being pulled over by a cop for perfectly safe, oftentimes strictly legal riding.
On the other hand, you'd be hard-pressed to find a motorist that ever faced consequences for murdering a cyclist.
Yes and no. I am sorry when cyclists flaunt the rules — it does happen — but there are also those of us that strictly obey the law. (It helps keep me alive.) But I see cars break many of the same rules, quite often. For example, seeing a car run a red isn't even a rare thing. (A rare one is seeing a car driving the wrong way.) Between the two groups, I don't think I see one break the rules more often than the other. (I certainly see more violations from motorists… but I also see more motorists.)
> never seeing a single cyclist cited for the law breaking,
I've seen this, multiple times. Oddly, only while biking. Probably about as (in)frequently as I see motorists get cited.
> So as long as the law says cyclists must obey the same rules car drivers are also supposed to obey, the subset of cyclists that break those rules on a regular basis do not help, in the least, the arguments to try to convince car drivers to be more respectful of cyclists.
That there are those out there that don't obey the law should not matter to validly argue that the world would be better — that is, fewer cyclists would die — if both motorists and cyclists alike would obey the law.
If you’ve ever biked in a city, you would know that the people who get pissed more than anyone else by bikers following red light rules are the cars behind them that cannot accelerate when the light turns green, because the biker in front of them is slow to get going.
Invariably, they will simply get pissed and try and pass the bike dangerously, if not honk or hit them out of the way.
1) The hits by cars result in the deaths of tens of thousands of pedestrians per year in the US compared to single digits, if any, by bicycles.
2) Dead people don’t write HN comments.
Reaction from police and Uber to a photo with the plate and the car making contact with my bike? "meh"
I wish there were more places with bike lanes like Amsterdam and Copenhagen
The bike lanes came later... (and yes they are a god send)
Most of what the cyclists comment here would result in car drivers getting a huuuge insurance increase.
This is insane. Cyclists run stop signs, red lights, etc. all the time. Pedestrians run out in to traffic from behind parked cars. If they get hit when they do that it's their own fault.
What everyone needs to understand in every mixed traffic environment is that sharing the road goes both ways. Drivers have a responsibility to look out for cyclists, but cyclists have a responsibility to make themselves able to be seen. Everyone has a responsibility act in a way that allows their actions to be predicted by other users of the road, you never want to be surprising people.
If your actions cause someone to have to hit their brakes or make evasive maneuvers and you had a reasonable choice to not do those things, you're the one in the wrong even if you're legally right.
IOW, you’re right. Law is funny that way.
The insurance arbitration can be weird though: if you are getting out of a parking spot, with all the indicators and cautious maneuvers, and get hit, you are at fault. Bike, car, bus ...
Furthermore, a lot more cyclists fit in a city than cars, and they are more likely local population who also take care of local Co2 reduction. Although tourists are welcome to cycle as well.
s/Holland/Netherlands
And/or: Holland are two provinces of The Netherlands.
The distinction between Holland / Netherlands is not interesting unless you are from down here. It is similar to the distinction between hackers & crackers. Yes it is different, no.. most people don't care (and shouldn't care IMO).
Instead they added a stop sign to the main road and now more people run that particular stop sign.
Always seemed like a reasonable policy to me. The people operating heavier vehicles have a higher inherent responsibility to operate them safely.
I found it very enlightening to learn that even in the Netherlands, there used to be car culture similar to here, and it took the death of some children, and a grassroots campaign, before meaningful change began to occur.
There are many lessons to learn from the Netherlands with regard to bicycle infrastructure, and for our sake I certainly hope it doesn't involve the death of children.
It doesn't have to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Copenhagen
Like the Netherlands, the city of Copenhagen has a highly evolved bicycle infrastructure, but the catalyst for change was the dual oil crises in the 1970s which led to car-free Sundays and other oil preservation measures. People disovered that they actually appreciated the lack of cars and many started using bicycles as an alternative. This resulted in a grassroots movement campaigning for bicycle infrastructure in the city. The municipality caught on and today almost two thirds commute by bicycle.
Because most of us grow up that way, later in life, when we drive a car, we have the proper respect for bicycle riders. We drive slower when we overtake them, we looks in our mirrors before taking a turn.
good infrastructure helps too, but from having lived in the US and Europe, I think it's largely a cultural thing.
This is so weird to me. It’s the complete opposite in the Netherlands. Because you are in a car, and you are best protected, you’re basically always in the wrong if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian, regardless of what they were doing (at least that’s what I was taught).
And let's hit cyclists with the same penalties as drivers for the same violations.
I see cyclists blowing stop signs and ignoring traffic lights regularly.
Is it even within three orders of magnitude?
[1]: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31136893/pedestrian-death...
The reason why I sometimes treat traffic lights as stop signs is because I'm worried the driver coming up to the red light might be distracted by their phone and run right into me. This has happened to two of my friends.
So my seemingly disregard of the traffic laws is often to put more space between me and heavier vehicles.
However if car and I end up at a four-way stop at the same time, I'll let the car go first because I don't trust that driver saw me.
With driving a two-ton vehicle should come more responsibility and attention, but Americans view driving as a God given right.
This is something motorcyclists need to be hyper-aware of too. Same idea approaching yellow lights. Here’s a scenario that happens all the time: you’re coming up on a yellow. There’s a car in the intersection ahead waiting to make a left into your path. The car behind you isn’t slowing down, he either isn’t paying attention or wants to run the yellow. What do you do to stay alive?
The right answer is to act earlier to avoid that situation in the first place, but there will be times when you find yourself in a bad spot.
It is a yellow light, go through if it isn't safe to stop. I really don't understand the problem here.
It can seem like a non-issue, but it really isn’t. Drivers’ eyes are trained by experience to recognize other cars. From a driver’s point of view, an approaching bike (motor or otherwise) is a narrow vertical line that has very little apparent motion. Even if they see you, it’s really hard for an oncoming driver to gauge your speed.
There are things you can do to make yourself more visible, like swerve a little in your lane. This gives you some lateral motion that makes you pop out of the background.
The point is that on two wheels you face situations that four wheel drivers don’t think about or understand because they take their visibility for granted.
Most drivers break the law every day in ways that are much more dangerous than a cyclist running a stop sign.
Let's consider speeding, one of the most dangerous and commonplace of traffic violations. Drivers are rarely penalized for it, despite its potential lethality.
On the other hand, it is relatively easy for a cyclist to clear an intersection due to a bicycle's slower speed and better field-of-vision.
Perhaps it's best to leave this issue to cyclists; most cyclists are drivers, but very few drivers are cyclists. And it shows.
[1]: https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/fr/home/protection-des-donn...
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
"More severe" includes "any at all."
https://cobblescycling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/4-gave...
Look at Boulder Colorado which has an extensive network where many of the paths hug the creek running through the city.
The easiest place to start in most cities is to just build paths along rivers and streams that go beneath or above roads.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houten
Come visit!
>The design principle of separating cycling and walking from car traffic has been pushed to the limit. Houten is unique in this. Cycling comfort and safety are extremely high (optimal), even by Dutch standards. A large network of bike paths makes it convenient to cycle to various destinations and within the town the bike is the most popular means of transport. > The city of Houten is known as, nationally and internationally, and in growing interest from home and abroad, as the worlds best practical example for bicycle friendliness. A growing number of groups with politicians, developers, designers and students visit cycling city Houten for study purposes and inspiration.
This sort of thing is a big part of why places like Houten (and Odense - basically second or third tier cities with good infra but lower cost of living than capitals) are on our short list.
So, I personally believe that building brick roads with bike lanes in dense areas is a great solution. With brick, cars naturally slow and people naturally shop more.
I'm so sick of this "but cyclists are mean too!" whataboutism in every thread of this nature.
Had a cyclist illegally cross horizontal to a lane on a 40mph road, almost resulted in a 3 car collision - luckily all three drivers (including me and the car behind me) were paying attention.
A cyclist absolutely can cause deaths by not obeying the laws of the road.
Just hire the same lawyers that the tobacco industry was paying.
I should send someone a memo
Having said this, (as a daily commute cyclist pre covid) the issue is lack of delegated infrastructure- and I think that applies not just for mixed human drivers and human cyclists but (as much as it disappoints) we will likely need separate roads for self driving cars and human (cars / bikes / pedestrians).
Self driving seems a really hard problem now we are past the "california highway" level. To be safe at night or in rain or in Italian backstreets or Mumbai rush hour seems behind reach.
So we can use infrastructure to reduce the need for better AI. But that gets expensive. We can probably avoid building a second road network - but we need compromises.
Separated bike lanes will help this - those great wide Dutch streets with pedestrian bike car and the tram lanes come to mind - main roads where the central lanes are for automated use only.
The cost will be enormous (and blows most business models out the water) but we may win elsewhere - reclaiming some of the streets back as living areas, migrating deliveries off trucks and into smaller slower delivery vehicles designed to trundle down thinner streets.
Either way i look forward to a future of slower vehicles a d bike paths
Do you want ANTI-bike laws that ban bikes from everywhere not permitted? To someone rich, the "solution" to having to deal with bike liability is to ban bikes.
The only solution is separate bicycle and car infrastructure. Period.
Yes, it sucks that San Francisco has backed off separate infrastructure due to budget. However, the solution is to go lobby SF and to make pro-bike infrastructure a single vote issue to make them put it back.
One thing I do not understand: why hasn't some rich millionaire/billionaire taken some second/third tier city and funded bike infrastructure into it? It seems like it would be a lot easier to get bikers to move to a city that has infrastructure rather than trying to jam infrastructure into city that is basically land-locked/water-locked.
I've asked a good number of both bikers and drivers in my area and they don't know that the laws exist:
A driver must move over to the next lane if it is open and a biker is in the bike lane or the lane the driver is in.
A driver must not pass closer than 3 feet from a biker
A biker may take an entire lane and ride two wide
I think if drivers knew that the above rules, and it became a norm to take the entire lane when 3 feet was impossible based on the size of the lane, then biking would be safer.
To not leave this as a "this is bad" without proposing how to fix it... the education could be incorporated into gaining your drivers license, city sponsored advertisements, or having police actively spend a period of time enforcing the above laws (warnings would be fine, more for education than penalty)... or all 3.
Hypothesis: Dutch drivers are more careful around cyclists primarily because everyone rides a bicycle themselves. Knowing what it's like riding a bicycle in heavy traffic makes you a more careful driver.
It should be mandatory to learn to use the road on bicycle before even applying for a car licence. The biggest problem I see is that people simply don't know what it's like to use the road outside of a car. Neither on foot nor on a bike. Dashboard perspective is a real thing. It makes you see other people as obstacles rather than people who are just trying to go to work or return to their family, like you.
Requiring bicycle training would dramatically increase the number of cyclists on the road, essentially taking it back from the tyranny of motorcars. It would also ensure that those who do decide to learn to drive have the experience necessary to be a good road user. Additionally, if they do end up causing an accident the licence can be revoked and they can get back on the bike.
That said, around where I live, car / cyclist collisions are still pretty frequent; I live in an area with a lot of roundabouts where cyclists have right-of-way, but because of angles, darkness, rain etc, visibility of cyclists is often very low.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
In my (non-cycling-related) experience, this is never true. That is, litigation gets you little, if anything. If there is no public, political way forward (inside or outside the political establishment), then you're stuck, and had better work on that.
Ideas:
* Promote use of public mass-transit instead of private cars (e.g. via infrastructure and mass transit investiment)
* De-motivate use of private cars (e.g. through taxation on car purchases and/or on gasoline, stricter pollution regulation, more expensive parking)
* Change the law so that in all cyclist-car-driver accidents, the car driver is at fault unless he proves otherwise.
This all requires a lot of public pressure, which in turn requires public opinion work through local advocacy.
---
Alternatively, some people could go the vigilante way. I'm not advocating this, but in theory, acquaintance of the cyclist victim of an attack by a car driver can retaliate either immediately or ex-post-facto, not within the bounds of the law. That could mean something like a scratching a rebuke on the car's paint, or pasting a piece of material with a written message to the front window in a way which doesn't come off easily, or blocking the car from leaving its parking spot with some kind of inconvenience, together with a rebuke that is easy to remove (e.g. page of paper under windshield); etc.
This route does not require mass active support across a country or legislative district; it only requires passive local support for cycling and disdain for car drivers hitting cyclists - enough to create multiple potential suspects while making it very difficult for law enforcement to pin the actions on any one of them. i.e. if people in the same neighborhood don't rat them out.
I’m all about incremental measures to test theories. This is not one of the situations that warrants that approach. If a city wants to test out increasing bicycle infrastructure, they unfortunately have to build bicycle infrastructure.
I don’t think sharrows do nothing, that feels a bit hyperbolic. If a city were to build infrastructure for example, starting with sharrows seems fairly logical to get everyone used to the upcoming change.
Illegally parked vehicles don't last long around here ;)
I just can’t see how some paint on the road makes it actively WORSE, the cars and bikes are still there in the same volume as before.
Cars and bikes just don’t belong in the same infrastructure, it’s ridiculous to expect it to work long term. People in this thread mentioning bike lines in the middle of the road scares the shit out of me, that cannot where bicycle infrastructure ends up
The biggest lesson I had in my first season of commuting to work was "TRUST NO-ONE". Do not trust cars to do what they are supposed to do under any circumstances. Do not assume that eye contact with drivers will affect their behavior. Do not assume that slow car speeds are safe speeds. Any given car can turn in front of you at any time, or flip open a door on any side.
I once had the same guy almost get me twice in a single commute. He didn't mean to do it...just a very distracted driver.
I don't understand what change the sharrow gets people ready for. It just states a fact that was always true (there might be bikes here). Maybe it makes it front of mind?
When I'm biking, I interpret a lot of sharrows as "bikes, get your butt to this specific location", which can make me more afraid of other drivers if I use the road in another way that might come more naturally to me.
I'd also suggest putting it on driving tests, but I've never taken a state driving test where they go through and make sure you understand which questions you got wrong.
Though my dad thinks you only have to slow for pedestrians where there is a posted sign reminding you of that fact. So you can't win.
("Can't win" doesn't mean you shouldn't try.)
This is sadly a big part of the problem. It is amazing to me how common and popular it is to talk about hitting cyclists.
Any kind of solution that involves signage only is a middle finger to cyclists. I live in a very cycling friendly city, bike friendly infrastructure is the only thing that makes a difference. Even here where cyclists are super common, there is a pretty big portion of the population who treat cyclists as little more than road debris.
My hometown (and where I work now) is in an LA suburb and it and two adjacent cities recently implemented their “master plan”, and what they ended up doing was making arterial roads with heavy auto traffic traveling at 45-50mph into Class III bike paths. How do you expect a cyclist to “share the road” with cars going 3-4x their speed, or encourage novice cyclists? I think they just added sharrows to the busiest roads in the city and called it a day.
The planners were clearly not cyclists, or more realistically with one of the cities I sent a complaint to, had their hands tied and couldn’t devise any other way to get cyclists safely from one side of the city to another due to the car-heavy infrastructure the city already had. “Bicycle boulevards” like I saw while living in Berkeley and Cupertino where there were literally roadblocks, bollards, and speed bumps installed would be laughed out here.
One city planner told me that city council just didn’t see it as a priority, and that the councilmen just thought cycling was a “recreational activity” and didn’t see it as a serious commuter activity even though the planner himself was a bike commuter. Meanwhile car traffic is getting progressively worse and traffic lights still aren’t timed properly.
Most of all though, coming from Europe, I was shocked by how wide the street was, how wide the pavements was, and the enormous amount of space dedicated to inefficient street parking, even on major roads.
Somehow 400-500 years old city centers in Denmark manage to find room for cyclist in the very narrow streets. Often dedicating them to pedestrians and/or bikes. And adding bike lanes on major roads. But this is old cities without room for making bike lanes.
In SF, you could have bikelanes everywhere, give up street parking on one side of street... Or even just make the pavement less broad on broadway :)
It's a choice, Americans choose not to. To be fair their cities tend to be less dense involve greater distances.
SF bike lanes are a joke though, most of them have no actual barriers, so Uber drivers will just park in them/use them as a passing lane.
> A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Decades of investment in this shift have created a car-centric landscape with Dickensian consequences.
> In the United States, motor vehicles are now the leading killer of children and the top producer of greenhouse gases. Each year, they rack up trillions of dollars in direct and indirect costs and claim nearly 100,000 American lives via crashes and pollution, ...
>Many of the automobile’s social costs originate in individual preferences, but an overlooked amount is encouraged—indeed enforced—by law. Yes, the United States is car-dependent by choice. But it is also car-dependent by law.
All cities need to do is loosen their belts, and loosening zoning belts doesn't mean "become Manhattan", but rather just allowing townhouses, duplexes, triplets, and generally low rise <6 floor buildings, which were fairly common everywhere in cities prior to the introduction of zoning.
Also more recently "bike boxes" have been drawn on the street effectively widening a bike lane to cover the entire lane right in front of the intersection to ensure that all bicyclist are in front of and not to the right of waiting cars.
Unfortunately bicyclists are getting injured or even killed by cars or trucks turning right without noticing the bicyclist and the blue lanes and the "bike boxes" are attempts to prevent this from happening.
Danish publication about bicycle safety in intersections with some photos: https://idekatalogforcykeltrafik.dk/krydsloesninger/
I realized I am much more aware of these bright green lanes on the road than simple sharrows. Anecdotal, but I do think these or completely segregated lanes are the best bet to make sure everyone is safe.
If a car is in a traffic accident with a pedestrian or a cyclist he will always be assumed responsble.
(I emailed this to the author a few days ago.) I’m not saying these findings would hold up with better ridership data. But they were surprising findings, nonetheless. Plus, nobody wanted to hear it.
First rule of bicycle safety: "Paint won't save you."
I think the benefit is likely due to increased numbers of cyclists on those routes (and other routes - just a general heightened awareness of bicyclists).
Once you have a condition where you need to move left, out of the bike lane, it's a big step. But depending on your route, you may need to avoid pavement issues, trash or other debris in the bike lane, vehicles crossing the lane, or you may need to turn left or pass slower bicycles. And the aditional problem that if there's a marked bike lane, drivers will expect bicycles to remain in it.
Sharrows don't provide subjective safety, they just remind everyone that bicycles are allowed there, and should be expected there. (Of course, when they're marked too far to the right, it's worse than not having any markings)
In hindsight, this was a missed opportunity to build this infrastructure at a time when cycle usage (and therefore public support) was very high... and cycle participation has plummeted in the decades since to 1.7% of all journeys. Now, cyclists have the right to use all UK roads (except motorways), but only the bravest actually do so.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands has fantastic cycle infrastructure and participation is very high - although still lower than it once was in the UK! I don't think it is hyperbolic to say that given what we now know about climate change, harmful emissions and the health consequences of inactive lifestyles, this is a national tragedy.
Good cycle infrastructure encourages more people to cycle, and the rights of cyclists are better protected in societies where more people cycle.
[1] http://www.cycling-embassy.dk/2015/10/23/how-to-decrease-rig...
What? From the article
> we can conclude, that very rarely it is the cyclists who make the mistakes. Therefore, we mostly collaborate with the truck drivers and the authorities in solving the problems.
It's not a huge problem, its just one of the main recurring accident types. At most crossings the closed bike lane opens and becomes an combined right-turn lane and bike lane. It's routine to for +10 cyclist to merge with cars turning right. The fatalities from right turns are almost exclusively due to trucks and lorries that have hard time viewing cyclist in the mirror when they are close together.
Remember the majority of the population here cycles. So it is more of a public campaign to be aware of one of the more dangerous situations and provide information on how to avoid it.
Also see https://youtu.be/HjzzV2Akyds from 6 minutes on for right turns in Copenhagen.
As far as width goes, in European areas with high cycling rates bike lanes are very wide, nearly a car lane wide, so one can pass. American ones tend to be very narrow because cycling use is low and biking is treated as marginal.
You can have roads without bike lanes at all that are still safe for biking, but they have to be sufficiently narrow and slow. Most American streets are extremely wide, and so people often speed, which is an extremely common complaint in American residential neighborhoods. The difference is that most people will ask for a stop sign, which sometimes doesn't do anything, or they ask for speed bumps, which cost a lot of money.
I (used to :/) bike to work daily and was mostly scared of the intersections where the right lane crosses the shoulder/bike-lane to give drivers a quick right turn. A co-worker almost died on the scariest one after getting hit from behind, but was lucky enough to roll next to the car and only lose the bike.
Other risky ones are where the driver that's merging in won't expect a bike and suddenly blocks the bike lane to get a better view of the traffic. This generally happens on the long streets with fast traffic 45m/h+ as few bikers take the risk making it more likely that drivers "forget" that there's bike traffic.
Additionally, you can continue the bike lane paint within an intersection. But I don’t recall the data on that.
And yeah, those mixing zones are a disaster, especially when the bike facility completely disappears 100 feet before the intersection.
I do avoid one local intersection that I would otherwise use frequently because they haven't done anything and a large percentage of the time I pass through it cars get too close to me or someone else. In that case, part of the issue is that cars are effectively going from a freeway to a street level highway that turns into a freeway. Even though drivers here are generally much more chill than any other city I've lived in or visited, put them in a "near freeway but street level" situation and they will try to run you over.
Here they have been continuing bike lanes in intersections more often lately. I think they have often just used dotted white lines and do not use them both directions even if there are bike lanes both ways. I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like that and sharrows do nothing at all in any particular location but if there are enough of them all over the place might help remind drivers that cyclists exist. Or maybe they don't really do anything ever :/.
Of course the dangerous area isn't plain road at all, it's junctions. Drawing bike lanes on the road and giving up at junctions is all too common, and rather like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because it's where the light is.
I personally treat them as preferable to nothing, and except on really busy streets, preferable to door zone bike lanes.
Of course there are options better than either, and I prefer those. But I also don't really think bicycle affordances are the solution -- a legal/policy war on cars and drivers is.
On the majority of rides I am either dodging doors, dodging cars that are overtaking too close, or both. This entire stretch of road has a double yellow as well, which makes the overtaking even worse.
I got a Varia light/radar from Garmin so I can at least know when people are approaching from the rear. I feel a lot safer but that’s probably not actually true unfortunately. I highly recommend the light/radar combo because it is very helpful with overall awareness while riding.
I don’t know how this could be resolved because much of the street is residential with fairly small front yards and no driveways to speak of. So I’ll just have to do my best to stay safe and hope that drivers in my city get more accustomed to sharing the road.
I’m in a mid-sized Midwestern city and drivers just don’t get it. When I lived in Austin I felt much safer even with way more traffic, mostly because the drivers were more aware because there were plenty of cyclists on the regular.
This is actually my alternative to a much shorter and more congested route. I’m still looking for better options. Going into downtown means that I’m pretty much choosing the least bad option though.
As a starting point: ban cars from city centers. That should be the opening point of negotiation from cyclists. From there, maybe we can negotiate down to fixed infrastructure with separate cycle lanes. But the Overton window needs to be shifted dramatically.
That being said, the one way sharrows can be less deadly is to make them borderline useless for other cars, such as Silver Street in Albuquerque. Silver street has medians in its major cross streets so that cars can't continue straight, but bikes can. This, along with the facts that its speed limit is 18 mph and it parallels larger streets the reasons it's not used much by cars, despite not having the excessive stop signs that most gridded neighborhood streets possess.
But honestly where I feel safest, as both a driver and a cyclist, is in protected bike lanes. I'm much more scared of someone dooring me than I typically am of a car hitting me. I've adopted strategies to avoid moving vehicles but parked ones I'm typically forced to stay pretty close to and my avoidance options are usually 1) swerve into traffic and hope that the car next to me is paying attention and also avoids or 2) hope my brakes work super well and I can do a turn slide and hit the car door sideways. But natural reaction it to go with option 1 and 2 still sucks.
The issue is that cyclists aren't motor vehicles or pedestrians but we typically classify them as both (hell, one of the most recent Simpsons made this joke). If we're going to be encouraging cycling, and I think we should, we really need to rethink this classification conundrum.
it’s true, it’s much more explicit, and more equanimous.
and, in urban areas, a culturally dominant expectation of what ought to happen on roads.
but if all you get are signs: those are the signs to get.
I have had to explain that it is not illegal for a bike to ride on a road which didn't have "share the road" signs.
Edit: I suppose it’s also worth pointing out most of my bicycling experience comes out of San Francisco. A lot of the bicycle infrastructure here is newer than you would think, it was a noticeably more hostile place to be a cyclist 10 years ago when I moved here, but same could be said of any US city I assume haha
Edit: guess the downvote button means “I don’t agree with you” on hacker news now :/
What problem do they solve?
As a cyclist, they are a decent signal that you are on a path that probably won’t lead you into un-bikeable conditions.
Those feel like real problems to me.
Yet, I could still use more reminders of where bikes actually are going to be. Especially when driving in a different area of town where I'm not familiar with routes that bikes take. I know I've made some driving mistakes which I wouldn't make in my own neighborhood.
We throw out polls with tiny sample sizes as unreliable proof, a single ding against taking the lane shouldn’t discredit the entire mission of iteratively improving bicycle infrastructure.
Though yeah it’s really frustrating when it does happen, I’ve been there and I’ll give you that haha
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
b. Some bikes do have a non-human power source.
This can be a good thing to remind cyclists and drivers that that position is acceptable. Sharrows are often to the left of where people seem to think cyclists should ride.
It can be a bad thing, if cyclists and drivers take it to mean that's the only acceptable position. Depending on conditions and where the cyclist is headed, they may need to ride on either side of the sharrow, and it's presence may be limiting (like bike lanes can be).
Sharrows at intersections can be pretty useful to indicate the position of traffic detectors that are tuned for bicycles. It's usually possible to notice the patterns of pavement cuts for the loop sensors, but a little paint to highlight it is nice.
But it doesn't. A biker has the right to take the lane on any city street, so any position on any road is an acceptable lane position for a bike.
So what does a sharrows indicate?
Cycling accidents costs money in other ways as well: a) emergency responses to cyclist/car collisions b) insurance costs c) loss of healthcare savings (nationalised healthcare or not) d) well-being through physical exercise
Perceived safety from sharrows vs real safety created through separated bike lanes is exponential. You'd have a lot more commuters/children being allowed to bike to school and much more adoption. The investment in biking infrastructure will pay for itself in other ways.
I agree with you that there are hidden costs to just ignoring the infrastructure too, don’t get me wrong. Hell tack on the health benefits too, from both the act of riding and the improved air quality, investing in bicycles makes tons of long term sense.
But reality is we live with people who refuse to think ahead, who vote against their own best interests, who would gladly hold their wealth and watch others die from their homes. And they vote. Progress can and has been made, it’s just painfully slow and frustrating because it’s actively a problem that is actively killing people :/
Lane markings could work if the whole area is designed for shared use: roads are made single-lane or one-way, speed limits lowered to safer levels (30km/h), roadside parking spots removed both for safety and visibility, buffer spaces around corners and intersections, raised crossings for cars... a lot of cycle paths in the Netherlands have no grade separation and while a little less comfortable, they are still pretty safe due to how the traffic is organized.
This doesn't cover grade separation etc but is a good look at some of those design principles: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/a-common-urban...
Roads may not have originally been designed for cars, but that is what they are for now. You can make a philosophical debate that they shouldn’t be, and I would agree with you, but that is our shared reality.
The issue then is that cyclists are frustrated because they feel they have the same right to the road as cars do and drivers are frustrated because all but the most elite cyclists simply cannot keep up with posted speed limits.
The answer is full separate lanes either elevated or with a curb or barrier. We have them for pedestrians, we have them for cars, why not for cyclists where it makes sense?
It would be expensive, especially initially, but in cities it could help alleviate traffic congestion.
Do you not understand what the word "limit" means?
The maximum is there precisely so drivers can respond to slower traffic, not so all traffic will conform to that maximum.
The whole point of the thread is that bikes and cars sharing the road with these sharrows is dysfunctional so yes, that's the point...
> The maximum is there precisely so drivers can respond to slower traffic, not so all traffic will conform to that maximum.
I don't know of a single place in the US where the maximum isn't treated as something to conform to. I've driven in the Northeast, South, and California. You'll get honked at for going noticeably under the maximum in all three places. What you describe just simply isn't the practicality of the US roads.
Driving significantly slower than the speed limit is unsafe, too.
I actually once saw someone cross at the dashed lines and then take the on-ramp, and my first reaction was "whoa, that guy just careened across traffic to make his exit". Then I realized that he had actually waited for the dashed lines to appear. But when you do this (locals don't), it makes you look like a lunatic.
I think the best way to make bikes safe from cars is to give them their own separate infrastructure. What I worry about is that the infrastructure will be taken from that available to pedestrians. Where I live (suburbs near Boston) there are already too many roads without sidewalks. I've already gotten into more arguments than I can count with cyclists who believe an explicitly multi-use path near where I live either should be or already is bike-only. Maybe if "share the road" cyclists were also more willing to "share the path" I'd consider them allies instead of hypocritical rivals.
I watch drivers drive over them all the time. They're worthless.
Long Island, NY (where I live) is probably one of the most dangerous areas in the country for bicyclists. We had a big ol' controversy, a couple years back, when some politician stated that people just plain shouldn't ride bikes on Long Island. That did not go over well.
I used to live in the DC suburbs, where they had real curb-separated bike lanes. They were much better.
https://nybc.net/education/bike-law/2-uncategorised/68-a-sum...
I see people swerving into them, all the time, to get around other cars. That's a Bozo no-no.
Here someone will always cry "it will kill the businesses on that street", but then the opposite happens. It's a more quiet street, it's walkable, can sit outside and drink a coffee etc.
Market Street seems like a poor place for sharrows.
People driving cars are the leading cause of dead children in the United States. Of course, we just call it "unintentional injury" because we're too cowardly to say "gross negligence".
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
I hit a cyclist once, breaking his shoulder and collapsing the windshield and roof of my car. I was driving on a three lane, 45 mph road in the middle lane, and as I passed a slowed right turning car in the right lane, the cyclist rode his bicycle out into my lane, from the front of the right turning car, perpendicular to the flow of traffic. I had maybe 10-20ft to slow, and hit him at probably 20mph, if not more. His home insurance ended up paying for my damages.
"Part of it was the city of Denver’s reluctance to do much of anything for bicycles. So I figured, this would be a less expensive approach versus the conventional bike lane markings. A lot of the agencies don’t want to do anything involving change or spending money for bicycles. I was always under pressure to do less as the Denver bicycle planner."
I am all for measures that improve cyclists' safety, but presenting drivers with puzzles does not seem to be a good way to go about it.
I’m not sure a grade separated lane is really necessary or desirable for long stretches of road. The renderings show planters separating the car and bike lanes. That could be enough on its own.
Did they have a plan to buy street sweepers that could clean the grade separated lane?
Sharrows are dangerous on a busy street. That is why bicyclists are afraid to use them. Which causes cars to ignore them, because there is never a bicycle in them. Which makes them more dangerous to use.
They should never have been placed on busy streets to begin with, and those that are there should be removed.
I do occasionally appreciate them when they're in the _middle_ of a one-lane road, so it's more clear that I as a cyclist have equal right to take over the lane.
So basically it's a way for the city administration to say they do something while doing less than nothing.
Unfortunately with the rise of the NIMBY movement, it will only get worse before it gets better.
Making bikes a priority necessarily means making car less important, deal with it.
https://www.massbike.org/16seconds
>The police report confuses the presence of a shared road marking (or sharrow) as a bike lane.
This has nothing to do with the San Francisco leadership preferring shallows. There is not currently any money for it. They hope to bring a separated path in the future.
If the author wants to write the people of San Francisco a check, go ahead.
Let's also remember that many of the large employers that existed on Market Street have either left, or gone remote for at least the next year. There is zero urgency for what is, for at least the next year, a mostly quiet, low traffic corridor. The city government is wisely allocating limited resources to more pressing matters. AKA, this global pandemic thing you might have heard about.
EDIT: For the jerk that cowardly downvoted me.
> Given the economic challenges and changing demands we now face in San Francisco due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, our departments came together and made the tough decision to adjust the design for Better Market Street in order to move the project forward. As a City, we remain committed to working with our community partners and delivering the Better Market Street project to make this vital corridor safer, more resilient and more inviting for all. -Acting Public Works Director Alaric Degrafinried
> The full project from Octavia Boulevard to Steuart Street was estimated to cost over $600 million when the project was approved. However, the City has only secured approximately $200 million to plan, design and construct the project. The funding gap was going to be a challenge even before the current financial crisis decimated our department budgets. In order to move forward and construct the project, the design scope had to be reduced to fit within the budget.
> The redesign does not preclude the option to build sidewalk-level bikeways later. We plan to revisit this segment between 5th and 8th streets in the future when conditions improve.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/549e254bccb6413b953d117...
Please respond to these points as opposed to cowardly hiding my comment without any public response.
As the survey suggests, the idea situation is where bikes have physical separation from cars by a long margin.
With sharrows, drivers and cyclists have a shared understanding and expectation of what the appropriate traffic flow is supposed to be. With separate lanes, I have drivers trying to blindly turn through me and very consciously try to run me off the road. No contest.
I’m not saying this should be every cyclist’s preference, just sharing my experience (which honestly can be pretty terrifying in a situation designed for my safety).
Edit: I know it’s frowned upon to complain about downvotes but give me a fucking break. I’ve been almost killed cycling perfectly safely in supposedly safe areas, both because of the design and because people have literally used their cars as weapons. If you want me dead because I don’t find that acceptable for my own transport, downvote away. If I’ve said anything else harmful to the discussion please have the decency to explain what it was.
I do find that cycling on roads with "sharrows" have less aggressive behavior from cars.
/me: Cycle commuter for 15 years in Tokyo, 20km to 40km each way during the "before" times. Currently mostly casual group café rides totaling 200km to 300km a week.