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.
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.
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.
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.
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.