ped/bike improvements

[gfish]

I spent the day biking around town as part of my half-assed attempts to get ready for STP. Without a whole lot to occupy my attention, I thought a lot about pedestrian and bicycle improvements. This is my list of what the city (any city!) needs to do. Nothing extravagant, just basic steps if we're actually serious. It wouldn't be practical to do all this at once, but they should be basic design criteria for all roadwork and upgrades.

• Basic principle: As it is quite legal in Seattle, sidewalks need to be designed with bicycles as well as pedestrians and wheelchairs in mind. You get a lot more riders if you can make sidewalk riding easier -- it's a hell of a lot less scary than most arterials, particularly if you're slogging it out uphill.
  
  
  
  • Utility poles should not be placed in the middle of sidewalks. If bikes and wheelchairs can't get by, you might as well not have the sidewalk at all.
  
  
  • All corners with curbs need pedestrian curb cuts. These should be at the corner, not tucked around the corner. It's important, particularly when riding along a busy street, to stay completely visible when crossing the side streets. People just don't pay enough attention when turing right.


• Marked crosswalks need to line up with the curb cuts. I mean, duh.


• We need more marked crosswalks, and more mid-block crosswalks (with pedestrian bulbs).


• Crosswalk signals and buttons are all fucked up. Currently, they only serve (in the vast majority of cases) to have the walk signal turn on the next time the traffic light cycle gets around to it. The walk signal does not turn on otherwise, and they don't influence the timing of the cycle. This is car-centric bullshit. The walk signal should always turn on for each cycle, rather or not a button has been pushed. The signaling buttons should serve the same purpose as car sensors in the intersection and influence timing. In particularly pedestrian-oriented areas of town, the traffic lights should default to all-red/all-walk until a car arrives to trigger a sensor.


• Any non-residential street that has the room should have marked bike lanes. The burden of proof for bike lanes needs to be on the side of the negative. Bike lanes are cheap and really good marketing.


• Car sensors in intersections seriously need to be able to detect bikes. One should not have to lay a bike down directly over the sensor in order to trigger it. This applies even in industrial areas, dammit.


• Shrubs need to be kept trimmed along sidewalks. Soil creep off of steep slopes need to be kept cleared off of sidewalks. This is probably the responsibility of the property owner, but in that case more fines need to be levied or whatever.


• In a slightly different vein, we need to drop the minimum parking spot requirements for new development. Maximum parking limits like SF has would be even better.

Comments

[ivy]

I totally agree on the sidewalk riding thing -- it's far less scary than riding along the side of a road where you're constantly having the "don't run me over please" fear. Bike lanes are good, but I would *far* rather ride on a sidewalk than on a road that didn't have a bike lane. I also agree with you about the common sense of lining up curb cuts and crosswalks. Several of my nearest and dearest are in wheelchairs, and it's obviously important for them to not get creamed when crossing the street.

I don't necessarily agree about the button-pushing, though. If the area doesn't have much pedestrian traffic and turning on the walk signal increases the length of the cycle in a way that's not optimal for the traffic that is there, then the requirement to push a button makes sense. For areas where there's constant pedestrian traffic (like downtown), having an automatic walk cycle makes sense. I see it as an engineering optimization problem -- no type of traffic is better than any other sort, but a good solution will optimize for the majority of the traffic while still adequately and safely serving the rest. Pedestrians shouldn't have to wait for nonexistent cars, and cars shouldn't have to wait for nonexistent pedestrians. (And yes, those sensors totally ought to pick up bikes too.)

[etb.livejournal.com]

I totally agree on the sidewalk riding thing -- it's far less scary than riding along the side of a road where you're constantly having the "don't run me over please" fear.

It depends on the road and the sidewalk. If there are driveways or objects to block visibility at intersections, you're almost certainly safer in the street, and certainly less obnoxious to pedestrians. No one, both peds and drivers, expect things on sidewalks to move 15+ mph. The peds won't kill you but the drivers definitely can.
Getting rear-ended is rare. Of course, you could ride a bike on a sidewalk at just above walking speed, but then you might as well just walk.

There are a lot of situation where bike lanes are worse than nothing. If there's on-street parking, you need a huge amount of space to allow safe bicycling, which is almost never available. (The "solution" of installing a bike lane that overlaps the door zone is much worse than having no bike lane at all.) Bike lanes are also hard to mix with bulb-outs: putting them out into the bike lane is horrible, but not having them go into the bike lane doesn't narrow the road much.

no type of traffic is better than any other sort,

No, environmentally superior, non-lethal traffic is better. The usual formulation looks like this (http://www.transalt.org/press/magazine/012Spring/09hierarchy.html). Also note that signal design that punishes walking discourages walking, so one reason for an area not having pedestrian traffic is because the signals are stupid. There are also public health benefits of walking and bicycling.

But I think the easiest solution to issues with signals in low-traffic environments is to just make Don't Walk mean "yield". Or better yet, replace everything with four-way stops.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the sidewalk riding. Having spent several years as a bicycle commuter, both on upright and recumbent bikes, I think the best solution is to have the lanes wide enough to allow lane-sharing, and to ride bikes *with* the traffic, by the same rules of right-of-way. My experience on both sides of the steering wheel has been that drivers watch for vehicles (fast moving, need space to stop or turn) on the road and pedestrians (slow moving, stop and turn on a dime) on the sidewalks. Apparently the accident statistics, (as best I could interpret them and bearing in mind that this was a few years ago and there may be new studies) suggest riding with the traffic on the road is safest also.

That said, I certainly sympathize in a visceral way with the uneasy situation of being passed again and again by cars you can't see coming, moving at high speed. I tried to use low-traffic roads as much as convenient.

[etb.livejournal.com]

If it's just the fact that you can't see them coming, you can use a mirror, but I've found it doesn't really help as much as I'd hoped—it's difficult to gauge the vehicle's angle of approach from a tiny mirror, and to decide whether the correct response is (a) do nothing, (b) get a little closer to the curb if practical, (c) crash over the curb to avoid being hit. It does let you look without (worrying about) veering off course as you're turning your body.

Yes, the statistics suggest everyone should ride in the road, though I'm skeptical whether they're handled right: if riding on the road were equally as safe as riding on the sidewalk, you'd expect to see fewer crashes for road riders, because they presumably have more experience. Also, IIRC, there are more vehicle-ped crashes in crosswalks than outside, but we don't conclude from that that no one should use crosswalks...

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

John Forester's book Effective Cycling claims that sidewalk-type riding -- 'mixed use' -- is something like 10-50x as dangerous as on-road riding, because of the cars-not-seeing-bikes thing. But the thing is, people *feel* more comfortable riding that way, so maybe getting them to start that way isn't bad.

I've only ever seen one rear-end car-bike accident. I've seen dozens of car-turning-right-in-front-of-bike (and been in three of them) and dozens of oncoming-car-turning-left-in-front-of-bike (and been involved in two.) But again, people *feel* like that's a really serious danger (hence why so many people ride on the wrong side of the street, against traffic) so it's probably something that needs to be addressed before the real danger situations, just to get people riding. Helmet mirrors or handlebar mirrors are cheap.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I fundamentally dislike forcing bikes to act like cars. If you want more people to bike, it's a bad sell. Bikes make crappy cars -- they're just motorcycles that can't go very fast at that point. Bikes are cool because they're flexible. They work well on streets and on sidewalks and playgrounds and fields and you can park them anywhere including your bathroom. They're cheap and green and they make you sexy. Effective Cycling is cargo-cult magic.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Yeah — I can imagine, and probably know a few, cyclists who can hold their own with cars, but I'm not one of them. Does that mean that, when I can't maintain a speed that the SUV behind me is comfortable with, I shouldn't ride?

What we really need is a separate class of rights-of-way for "light vehicles" like bicycles and segways.