Columbusite

Yay! It’s 2008 and we have a busy year. First up is more on the bikeways plan, since I read as much as I could.

Here are my apprehensions about the bikeways plan (monster .pdf) in it’s current form, though don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’re finally going to have an urban biking infrastructure that people will know about. I cited the sections so that it’s easy to find what I’m talking about and I’ll be sending this to Alta and recommend everyone to give their input. Here’s the Columbus area map (click to enlarge).

5.8 – High Street Share the Road with Bicycles Campaign – I like the idea, but am skeptical about the collaboration with OSU which has long demonstrated that it could care less about the city of Columbus. The very fact that they haven’t promoted something like this on their own long ago, is an example of their apathy for the city and for safety of students who choose to cycle instead of drive. I’d argue that separating the road with bike lanes on High works against the idea of sharing the road. I’d be happier without any bike-lanes on High and instead sharrows

(from the Tallahasee Democrat)

and “Share the Road” signs with a bike graphic. Actually, I just found one that would probably be even better than the ones commonly used:

Unofficial American version

Canadian version

5.13 – I like the Town/Bryden Bike Boulevard

and hope it moves up out of the proposed stage.

Signed Shared Roadways – I’m very concerned that streets like Summit meet this designation. A small green sign with a bike on it is not visible to cars, let alone cyclists (Table 8-1).

It’s the same color as the signs with the names of the streets, which no one really notices until they are looking for a specific street, which means the bike-route signs get ignored. They need to be a different and much more visible color if they are to stand alone. I never noticed the bike route signs on High downtown until I went by bike and that was after months of cycling on and off of High downtown. Cyclists barely notice them and cars traveling at much higher speeds won’t at all. Since it would probably take a decade of bureaucratic nonsense to simply change the color of these signs, they should all be accompanied by the W11-1 and W16-1 signs (Figure 8-24)

or one of the signs posted above for high visibility along with large sharrows. Custom signs that say bikes are “allowed” (8.10.3.)

simply re-enforces that cars belong first and foremost and that they should “allow” those meddlesome cyclists on the road. It’s simply poor wording. “Expect Cyclists” or “Expect Bikes” for example, lets drivers know that bikes are supposed to be there, not just tolerated.

Downtown – Proposed bike lanes are all on wide streets (Broad, Spring, Long, etc) which have a posted speed limit of 35mph which means cars are going faster. I know even with bike lanes I would not feel safe biking down Broad and I can imagine many cyclists getting injured or killed by cars taking high speed turns right through the right turn lanes. Physical barriers would need to be erected to ensure no last minute swerving into the the bike-lane. I’ll take riding in the middle a totally unmarked, two-lane 25mph road over a bike lane on a 4 lane, one-way 35mph road any day. If a “hardcore” cyclist like myself would feel unsafe in those lanes, I doubt an inexperienced cyclist will feel much better. I think putting that infrastructure on streets like Washington or Gay, where the speed limit is lower and there are only two lanes of traffic. You’d get more people on Gay than on Broad, especially since Gay is bike-friendly, it’s just that it’s not advertised as such.

Eric brought up a huge oversight regarding this plan, which I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention and that is the total omission of German and Merion Village. I myself bike German Village every now and then, though I have to go on Grant and a little bit of Livingston (use extra caution there) in order to get there, but once there it’s great for bikes (well, better for some than others, brick roads can be very bumpy depending on the bike) and 3rd St provides respite from the brick roads, although the speed limit is way too high at 35mph. It’s really something that this street, the heart of German Village, is about to be left out altogether with no connection to downtown. I’m hoping they will at least give 3rd St some sort of treatment and Whittier would be nice too along with another speed limit reduction.

I really don’t see several of these routes working without several speed limit reductions and the traffic engineers at ODOT have proven that they only care about cars going as fast as possible and not at all for pedestrians and cyclists who get hit by cars thanks to their idiotic, myopic “vision” if you could even call it that. They’re the reason why the city has had to make the 25mph speed limit on Neil “temporary” otherwise they’d force a 35 mph speed limit on a street officially designated as a bike route. Bexley seems to have found an out, as you’ll notice whenever you drive down Main through Bexley that the speed limit is 25mph while on the east and west side (Columbus) it’s 35mph. We should just do what ever they did. So there it is, my 2 cents on an extremely important piece of our urban transportation puzzle.

You have until January 11th to make any changes.