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

[Trevor Bourget]

At 09:25 AM 2/26/2008, John Eldon wrote:
>On Thursday evening and Saturday morning I heard a traffic expert 
>claim that lane stripes and even bike lanes or shoulders with 
>contrasting colors help reduce motorist speeds, particularly when 
>the main travel lanes are narrowed to 10 feet. Bike lanes also help 
>reinforce a "no parking" message.

All nonsense. What were the credentials of this ill-informed spreader 
of falsehood? Any citations of studies which might convince me I am 
instead the one mistaken?

Best inducement to speeding is a feeling of comfort doing so. When 
your car/bike starts to shimmy or make weird noises, you slow down. 
Same with the lane stripes, if they were gone altogether you'd feel 
weird about where it's safe to drive. Nice safe channels induce higher speed.
Bike lanes help carve out a "useless" zone of the road, which 
therefore is safe for all sorts of non-driving things: putting out 
cans on trash day, parking, construction signs, etc. Best way to make 
a no parking message is to make sure a motorist feels sure their car 
would be sideswiped if left there; second-best is zero-tolerance enforcement.

I might believe that more narrow lanes in the same space result in 
lower average speed than fewer wide lanes. And certainly there is 
such a thing as a too-wide lane. I think 16ft is too wide, for 
example. I'm not sure where the cutoff is, though. The solution for 
those is not a bike lane, but a shoulder or a gore(cross-hatched) 
portion near the center to eat up the untraveled roadway width.

>I have sometimes felt indifferent between wide outer lanes and 
>narrow outer lanes + bike lanes or shoulders, but if a WOL is indeed 
>an invitation to speeding, it may not be such a panacea.

If you have felt indifference between the two choices, you should 
continue trying to move left. Once I found where it was in fact 
safest to ride, I found myself to the right of a bike lane stripe a 
minority of the time. As such, the bike line is an active abrasive, 
because it tells motorists the lie about where I should be. I 
frequently hear "get in the bike lane" from motor vehicle windows. 
Those are not the times when I'm riding left of the bike lane, but 
when I'm lane splitting between other inner lanes. Frequently I hear 
the comment when there is no bike lane in sight. It is merely an 
expression of the sentiment that "bikes belong over there out of my 
way"; perhaps "get on the sidewalk" would have been heard as 
frequently when there were fewer bike lanes, I don't know/remember.

>You and I love and use the I-5 shoulder between Roselle and Genesee 
>and would never consider taking the lane on a freeway. Given the 
>speeds involved, I do not think the bike lane on Palomar Airport Rd. 
>is much different.

Taking the lane (being in line with motor traffic) and sharing the 
lane with a motor vehicle are not the same thing. I would be happier 
in both the places you mention if the outside lane were wide enough 
to share. It's in much better condition. By the way, the difference 
on a controlled-access highway is not the speed differential, but the 
expectations Caltrans has trained into motorists: no potholes, no 
animals, no debris, well-lighted, etc. The danger is not from high 
speed, but from inattention; you have to be at reckless speed, 
asleep, stoned, or blitzed, or equivalently distracted to crash on a 
freeway when traffic is moving at speed.

-- Trevor