Eek! "Walkies" on a bike. So "dangerous!"


-mr. bill

Then I'm glad that in my city, somebody is doing something right in spite of the usual complaints.

Don't get me wrong, Boston has done some great things really well. But comparing the geography of Boston to Toronto, there's just a lot more places in Boston where sharrows make more sense than segregating.

Sharrows don't make a lot of sense to me. They are supposed to indicate to motorists that this road is a preferred road for cyclists and that motorists have to share.

But that's redundant because ANY road a cyclist is riding on, motorists have to share.

The particular road in Toronto that has a sharrow is so congested, motorists really can't drive on it without having to change lanes for the parked cars anyways. Many times, I'd just take the entire lane or weave past all the traffic until I reach that protected bike lane I was headed for on Bloor Street.

On the roads where they've used sharrows here I think it really does improve driver attitudes.

Ugh, I hated that Vassar street bike lane and my worst dread was someday being ordered to use it. In part because it felt so unnecessary in my vehicular cycling youth, in part because its absurd positioning not only up the curb but completely on the wrong side of the sidewalk was utterly incompatible with making a mid-block left into campus to park for work.

Today I'd probably appreciate it.

I do not understand the fear of must use when we don’t even have frap here.

At least Metropolitan is IRE PROOF.

-mr. bill

...these words don't mean to a thing to me 'cause I'm an engineer

Glad to hear at least some things endure. I hear they tore down building twenty though (ok, was still there to see that, but it still was a shock, had only been in planning since the end of WWII)

Sharrows are one of the few things that turn out to be better in practice than they sound in theory. I could see if there's only one such street in the city, it probably would not be that effective, but that hasn't been my experience. I don't know if you're familiar with Boston, but it might be the least rationally laid out street system of any major city in North America. There's a lot of major streets that are just too narrow and irregularly routed to be able to retrofit with a bike lane. What I have noticed is that the sharrows, which are all over the place, seem to have retrained drivers not to freak out when a bike takes the lane. It also helps with the crazy 5 and 6 way intersections that Boston has so many of to be sitting in one of the lanes rather than trying FRAP in a context where people already have too many lanes to keep track of. You get honked at or otherwise harassed much less for doing this when there's sharrows.

Basically, they're good driver education tools.

As long as what works to get new people safely onto their bikes, there shouldn't be a problem.

In Toronto, bike lanes work. Sharrows seem to be marginally better than any confident rider on any street.

Marginal is a good term. Sharrows are far from the perfect solution (motorist still drive into crosswalks), but they do increase awareness, as they serve as visual reminders of the cyclist right to the roads.

In 2015 I posted:

Cities vary so much in their geography, it isn't surprising that some things work better in one than the other--just for comparison, the city centers are linked below:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bo...!4d-71.0588801

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yo...!4d-79.4077558

FYA, @livedarklions, I had earlier on this thread quoted a post to The Metro Boston Regional Discussion Forum this past March:

It's hard to tell whether bike lanes or bike routes work just by looking at a map. How could you tell that by looking at Amsterdam and Copenhagen without actually being there? Same with New York City. I'm sure there remains the standard critics of NY bike lanes but there is growth of cycling since NYC traffic had been redesigned.

By looking at a map of downtown Toronto, could you have seen the strong criticism that the planning of bike lanes had attracted? Only by installing those bike lanes as pilot projects have they been shown to be popular. It's the same argument you hear everywhere and I'm sure what was stated in Toronto is still being said in Boston. It's not over. The vote for Yonge Street in North York has been postponed because city council was split. The Mayor wants to move the planned bike lanes over to a side street west of Yonge so not to disrupt the traffic flow from the suburbs to the highway.

So I went on Youtube to look at some bike lanes in Boston. Well, I'm sure a few videos don't show what you're trying to explain but they look ok to me except that some of them seem to run down the middle of the road.

I should have been clearer--I was showing the city center of Boston, which is such a hodgepodge of small and large streets intersecting each other at odd angles to show somewhere sharrows are the most appropriate solution. There are plenty of places in Boston where bike lanes and paths work just fine, but there are others where the sharrow really has improved things. Toronto is more of a standard grid pattern, where I can see how sharrows wouldn't seem as useful.

One of the biggest challenges in riding and driving in the Boston area is that the streets are often laid out in different schemes where current or former city boundaries are or were. This gives you intersections with crazy multiple angles, and being off to the side of a lane when going through one of those is just not a good idea--the drivers can't easily keep track of all the other car lanes, adding a bike lane just increases the complexity.

That's horrible! Glad to hear she is okay, and hope the ability and/or confidence return soon, maybe some relaxed park / trailway rides...

That's the basic argument for physically protected lanes. They indeed constrain everyone's options, to constrain their errors. You still have to exercise extreme vigilance at the intersections (in a way, even more than you do when in traffic), but in between the danger is something you can control by choosing a speed that gives the reaction time you need. It works pretty well for more relaxed cyclists not packing all that much kinetic energy to begin with, it doesn't work very well for those who want to ride at the speed of automobile traffic.

Where have I heard that before. Was there something in the car that distracted him, or were they driving around with their eyes closed? Either way unless shop popped out from behind the bushes, they're still liable.

Anyway, its good to hear that she's OK. Just try and get her back on the bike as soon as possible. Baby steps if you have to. Just don't let this one unfortunate incident sink in and put her off from cycling. Of course, that's a decision only the two of you can make.