View Single Post
Old 01-20-22, 02:26 PM
  #7  
Korina
Happy banana slug
 
Korina's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Arcata, California, U.S., North America, Earth, Saggitarius Arm, Milky Way
Posts: 3,752

Bikes: 1984 Araya MB 261, 1992 Specialized Rockhopper Sport, 1993 Hard Rock Ultra, 1994 Trek Multitrack 750, 1995 Trek Singletrack 930

Mentioned: 31 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 1524 Post(s)
Liked 1,513 Times in 906 Posts
Originally Posted by 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.
You're right; ELRs are designed for roads with good sightlines In Williams's ELR Design Guidelines, he has this to say about the subject:
WHAT SIGHT DISTANCE IS NEEDED FOR AN ELR?
Most ELRs are installed on existing streets which were converted from a two lane
configuration. A street configured with two lanes has different sight distance
requirements than an ELR. Sight distance requirements are critical on ELRs when
visual obstructions, vertical curves, or horizontal curves may prevent drivers from
seeing oncoming traffic. Current domestic guidance recommending passing sight
distance is fundamentally incorrect.
Feel free to call me at 530-859-3468 about this design problem.
I don't see how it would encourage drivers to drive FRAP aside from passing each other and cyclists. It's supposed to be used on low speed, low volume roads, and anyway I don't see drivers being comfortable driving on a dashed line; it goes against their training. It is annoying that there's no crash data for cyclists, but we know where cities' priorities lie.
Korina is offline