Fabulous bike lanes!

[Geonz]

Amen!

Our campus bike path system looks great on the surface... it's only when you actually try to use it that you realize how nutty it is... if 90% of the time a path is okay, and you only endanger your life 10% of the time (sudden merges with the wrong side of a road, places you have to swerve around hazards, places where you're suddenly supposed to cross to the other side of a four-lane road - not to mention the "usual" conflicts of crossroads and driveways, trucks parking in the lane, that bus stop that's in the middle of it...) , that's still NUTS but it looks great from your car window and it means you can holler at the cyclists to get on their sidewalks/paths where they belong.

It's a complicated topic, though, and to top it all off so much depends on the specific traffic dynamics and culture of a given community.

[fikustree]

I also live in a *supposedly* bike friendly town. To me, the barriers make a lot of sense. The bike lanes that we have seem to be worse than riding in traffic because of all the parked cars, parking cars, turning cars, lack of bike lanes in intersections (!) and that they don't connect to each other. Even the roads here don't connect to each other so all the traffic, bikes, peds, and cars get on these major roads. It is scary. I take the sidewalk sometimes because that seems safest.

northstar- How do people get in accidents on the sidewalk?

[Torrilin]

Hit a pedestrian. Get hit by a car pulling out of a driveway. Hit another bike. Hit/be hit by a tree. Same deal as a road really, only people don't expect you on the sidewalk.

Sidewalks are a bad place to ride. No line of sight if you're on a bike. You may have unexpected 6" (15 cm) jumps in pavement height. There may be low hanging tree branches, or obstacles like kids' toys or a store's sidewalk display. If I've gotta be on a sidewalk, I walk my bike. Then drivers understand what I'm doing. Other pedestrians understand, *and* I'm moving at a speed sidewalks are designed for.