livedarklions

Interesting idea, but it's not really applicable to most of the roads where the crashes are likely to occur. I don't think this would work very well in NH, for example, because the kind of rural road this is designed for tends to be hilly and curvy, with poor sightlines ahead of the driver. If they're in the advisory bike lane entering a curve, they won't know there's a bike ahead of them in the bike lane, which I think is really the major hazard I experience on those sorts of roads regardless of where I am in in the road. By default, I tend to be extremely FRAP in those situations as it's the only part of the road I can be fairly confident a car won't speed through blindly. I don't think I'd change that strategy.


BTW, I'm not sure if you caught this, but "A 2021 study from the Mineta Transportation Institute found an aggregate CMF value of .56 using Empirical Bayes analysis for 11 U.S. installations studied over 8 years and approximately 60 million motor vehicle trips. This corresponds to a crash rate reduction of 44%. Only motor vehicle crashes were studied. There was insufficient data to evaluate vulnerable road user safety but no agency reported a bicyclist or pedestrian safety issue with their ELRs." In other words, there appears to be enough data to support that this arrangement makes DRIVERS safer, but only the lack of data to indicate that it's increasing hazards to cyclists. I'm suspicious of this because intuitively, this seems to be encouraging drivers to avoid the center of the road by driving, essentially, FRAP unless there's a cyclist ahead. The data could be documenting a situation where the drivers are being made safer by avoiding the center of the road and actually not improving the safety of pedestrians and cyclists or actually making those people more vulnerable.

I'd be a bit worried that this is really going to be seized upon to convert one-way urban roads into two way roads, which might actually encourage an increase in motor vehicle traffic.