[SDCBC] Pet peeve: cyclists have "no choice" but to be unsafe/crazy

[John Eldon]

Call it a bike lane or call it a shoulder, I am certainly extremely thankful to have and to use it on 55mph Palomar Airport Road.

Serge Issakov <serge at issakov.org> wrote: 
Pretty much.  I don't see a bike lane stripe to be any different, for all practical intents and purposes, than a shoulder stripe.  So it's 6" wide instead of 4", and tends to get painted where there is a curb, while shoulder stripes are used where there is no curb.  But traffic engineers tend to treat bike lane stripes like shoulder stripes, including painting them parallel to the road edge rather than parallel to the road center like traffic lane stripes are painted.  And drivers tend to treat bike lane stripes like shoulder stripes, generally staying to the left of them and mostly ignoring what's to the right of them.  As far as I can tell, the propensity for bike lane stripes to cause debris to collect is no different than for shoulder stripes.  
 
Yet I don't hear anyone calling for "shoulder stripe ends" signs.

It's really too bad bike lanes are called bike LANES, because I think the "lane" part really sets up false expectations and inappropriate comparisons to real traffic lanes that cannot be achieved by paved space that is less than half the width of a real lane and needs to be regularly entered and crossed by vehicles that are also supposed to stay out of it.
 
Serge

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bikesandiego.org/pipermail/sdcbc/attachments/20080226/519e8756/attachment.html