General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

The worst bit of those bike lanes happens here as the eastbound lane nears the Mill intersection - it's merged into the sidewalk! That continues at MUT width for a little bit, but nothing has been rebuilt at the tracks so it becomes standard sidewalk width from there. Oof.

I hadn’t noticed that.   

My impression is that while I still don’t understand why they insist on putting the barrier curb between the bicycle lane and the boulevard, rather than between the motor vehicle lanes and the bicycle lane, I think even this very flat concrete bicycle lane is a signfiicant step up from just paint. The visual appearance is that the road is just the 4 motor vehicle lanes and while I can’t speak for other motorists I think they are less likely to swerve into these bicycle lanes than paint-only lanes.

Still doesn’t explain the fixation on roll curbs, but I guess we’ll see what happens as collision statistics accumulate over the next few years.

I think it's an improvement over a simple painted line, I am not convinced it is much improvement over a buffer. And frankly, roll curbs come in many different degrees, for some reason engineers insist on using the flattest possible curb between the bike lanes and roadways. I can only believe that some of our engineers fundamentally disagree with the concept of separated bike lanes and seek to minimize the separation as a result.