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

[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.