Much is brewing with the Downtown Bicycle Boulevard, formerly know as the Nueces Bicycle Boulevard, and I will be writing more about that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to share this great StreetFilms video from Washington DC where traffic engineers took a formerly 4 lane one-way road and gave it a lane diet to make room for two way bike lanes. What’s interesting about this conversion is that the contraflow lane is placed on the other side of parked cars from traffic providing a buffer from oncoming traffic.
At one of the recent bicycle boulevard meetings, it was pointed out that 4 lane one way streets such as Guadalupe and Lavaca downtown were equipped with sharrows instead of bike lanes because there was “not enough room.” It seems that these streets have an abundance of space and that we are simply choosing to let the automobile hoard all of it. This contraflow concept might be just the ticket for carving out space for other forms of transportation.
on Apr 3rd, 2010 at 1:56 am
Guadalupe and Lavaca are perfect as is. Since the sharrows were added, I’ve had maybe one hostile interaction with a car on those streets. They were more frequent before. Drivers expect me to take the entire lane and don’t get mad about it. They just switch lanes and go around like they’re supposed to. Bike lanes would lead to > 35 mph zooming by me at close range instead of half a traffic lane away.
Bike lanes are probably more effective at attracting new riders, but new riders will probably never use Guadalupe and Lavaca downtown regardless.
on Apr 5th, 2010 at 8:39 am
I voted against bike lanes on Guad/Lavaca on the UTC back in the early ’00s by the way. Downhill there’s no need; uphill the whole lane would be needed anyways; so sharrows are, indeed, the perfect facility here.