[SDCBC] What where they thinking?

[Big50_1@yahoo.com]

I've been following this thread and several items came to mind: (a) biking for exercise, (b) biking for transportation (safe) and (c) biking for transportation (not-so-safe). (A) Biking for exercise: SR56 and San Luis Rey River Trail are two examples of continuous bike-friendly roads that kinda' start nowhere and end nowhere but are great in-between (by the way I'm working a training plan on SR56 to do a metric century, I love that road!).  (B) Biking for transportation (safe): examples are Pacific Beach and over-seas urban locations (China, Philippines, etc.) where road congestion is high and car speed is low.  Bikes and cars intermingle safely and bikes are used to get around the local area with more efficiency than cars. Then there is (C), biking for transportation (not-so-safe): this any place where the car-bike speed differential is high.  Kinda' every place else.  You can spin it any way you want but the fact is that unless there is a physical barrier between
 high-speed cars and low-speed bikes, there is potentially extreme danger to the bike rider.  Even with the best bike-friendly road markings. Poorly laid-out road markings for bikers may increase the danger but again, unless there is a physical barrier between cars and bikes, there is always potential danger for the biker that can never be removed.   Why the angst re road markings? Better road-marking will (may?) lower the instance but NOT eliminate biker damage from bike-car accidents.  Barriers, class 1 roadways and maybe better technology (bike-avoidance radar in cars) would drastically reduce biker fatalities/injury.  Just my $.02.
       
---------------------------------
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bikesandiego.org/pipermail/sdcbc/attachments/20080327/3a743026/attachment.html