(just posted to the austin transportational cycling list)
As I’ve tried to point out before but obviously not succeeded, dosage discount the danger for SCB is that it becomes an ‘attractive nuisance’ – i.e., if you stripe a ‘bike lane’ or a ‘shoulder’ or even a ‘shared use area’, you are making an implied recommendation that this is where cyclists should be riding. (Well-established in both legal and traffic engineering circles).
Thus, the facility to which you’re ‘attracting’ the cyclists to had better meet some basic, bare minimum, safety guidelines such as AASHTO. As many have pointed out, AASHTO standards for bike lanes next to parking are still not great – a good chunk of the bike lane would be in the door space, but the Gandy design would have had all of the bike lane within the door zone, and the ‘space’ shrinking to perhaps a foot when being passed by a motorist while you yourself were passing a parked truck – i.e., you would get brushed even if the parked vehicle never opened its door. The 10-foot shared space has this same exact problem; the absence of the stripe separating ‘bike lane’ from ‘parking lane’ makes no difference.
I get the sense that many people still haven’t looked at these pictures, which tell the story far better than my words possibly could.
Take a look. That’s not “normal bike lane bad” where the door would extend part of the way into the bike lane when it’s open. That’s “guaranteed collision bad” where the cyclist fundamentally doesn’t have enough space to travel even when the truck’s door is closed.
Some people (who must not have looked at that picture) drastically underestimate how bad a facility this is – thinking that they (good rider) would just get into the travel lane to pass the parked car. This forgets that:
- Most inexperienced riders don’t know to do this, and will thus ‘swerve’ at the last moment, or maybe not even go out into the lane at all,
- Experienced riders will take the lane well in advance of the parked car, and will (in my, and Lane’s experience at least) get honked at, or possibly someday worse.
A facility which encourages inexperienced cyclists to perform unsafe manuevers and which causes conflict with other road users when experienced cyclists do what they’re supposed to do has no place on our roadways. It doesn’t matter how the other roads in the city are designed – if this one fails some basic minimum safety standards, it’s a horrible, horrible design and needs to be rethought. If this means removing SCB from the city’s bicycle route system, so be it.
That’s the bottom line here – the city is basically signing up for a huge potential liability lawsuit, and if it ever happens, I’ll be glad to testify that they were warned early and often.
