Originally Posted by
flangehead
Well, there's a defense.
Getting back to the original purpose of this thread, I've seen enough to conclude that ELR is a potential treatment that should be in the "toolbox", just like sharrows. We don't get better mechanics by limiting the tools they can use, and just adding tools doesn't give us better mechanics.
Maybe, but there's an argument to be made here that using a non-standard tool actually could weaken the usefulness of the tools you already have--I'm not sure I like the idea of creating different levels of protection in painted bike lanes, we already have a big enough problem with drivers treating mandatory bike lanes as "advisory when convenient".
And again, none of the data cited in the OP link suggests that this actually improves the safety of cyclists and pedestrians, only that there is a reduction in collisions between motor vehicles on a very narrow subset of roads.
This is entirely anecdotal, but my experience with sharrows is that the message they convey takes a pretty short time to sink in, and then drivers start to normalize the fact that on roads so marked, they can expect to find bikes in the lane. I've had a couple of arguments with drivers in the last few years (literally a couple) where they obviously knew they looked foolish when I pointed to the sharrow.