Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Not in my experience. Protected lanes without floating parking lanes tend to be wider but floating parking is more popular. The third picture in mr._bill’s post above shows the typical width of a floating parking lane I’ve seen. They tend to be only about 6 feet wide to begin with and a foot to 18” is taken up by a gutter pan. Riding down the center of one (to avoid the pavement/gutter pan seam) puts the cyclist about 3’ away from cars which is fully in the “door zone”.
Putting your tires just to the side of the gutter pan puts you 48" from the cars, also keep in mind the drains are not usually continuous (though I did see a stretch in New Brunswick...). The other thing is that even if you do get a door-handlebar strike the aftermath isn't into traffic; not to say that it can't still be serious injury, but the situation doesn't compound the way it does in a lot of dooring or more prevalent door-dodging deaths where the cyclist not only ends up impacting the ground with their own kinetic energy, but then getting hit or run over.
As for the drain pans, the ones with longitudinal bars that aren't safe to roll over need to go, and most have. Remaining ones need to be reported.
There's also no reason for protected lanes to be narrower overall; same travel lanes, same parked cars, just swapping sides.
Mid-block issues are seldom more than inconvenient. As the article by Solomon pointed out, trading a low incidence problem like getting hit from behind for a much more prevalent accident mode is hardly making us “safer”.
About a third of our deaths including our only bike share one seem to be mid-block. They also tend to be the ones the cyclist has the least ability to prevent (at least short of bold tactics like taking the lane that invite abuse, including from the police), and the fear that keeps most of the people intimidated from riding from doing so.
Unfortunately, yes intersections remain a large danger.