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

[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...