personal safety & signed bike routes in residential neighbourhoods

[Eden]

What I see with the green box they put near my house is that we don't generally have no right on red intersections, so drivers don't expect one. Many drivers have never noticed the sign that was put up and they don't know what the green box means, so they continue to make rights on red. Cyclists on the other hand more often know how the green box is supposed to work and are expecting that drivers will follow the rules… Fortunately it's on a moderately steep up hill section of street, so cyclists are not going so fast they cannot react to someone who turns across the box illegally. As far as I know only a few were put in as an experiment here, and while they haven't to my knowledge been removed, I don't think the program continued. The city is still using green pavement markings to indicate certain areas where bike lanes merge into regular traffic and some sections where regular traffic must cross bike lanes. I don't know if those make any difference or not to remind motorists to check and cyclists to prepare or if they suffer from the same problem of making it the other guy's problem. The green paint doesn't look gritty or non-slip, so it gives me the heebie jeebies to ride on if it's wet, but I don't think it's overly slippery - I do try to avoid it when possible though...

[ny biker]

Related to bike lanes, I just posted a thread with a link to a great column by Bob Mionske about door zones and bike lanes. He points out that it is often safer to ride to the left of a bike lane in order to avoid being doored. This is a big issue that I have with some of the roads in my town that were retrofitted -- restriped to narrow the car lanes and add bike lanes -- while on-street parking is allowed and in fact is heavily in demand.

http://forums.teamestrogen.com/showthread.php?t=54738

[rebeccaC]

My problem is that it is not actual safety, but only the illusion of…. There's plenty of data to back that up and one rather flawed Canadian study to refute it (they studied a 10 or so block section of separated bike track with *no* intersections and declared that separated cycle tracks reduce cyclist accidents by an amazing 80-90%!!! - total BS- though I do suppose that it prove well that intersections are the problem area… a place that cannot be separated, and the rest of the cycle track is simply window dressing)

What Canadian study are you referring to?....I'd like to read it

The 7 month Anne Lusk Harvard Montreal study I mentioned earlier included 6 (two way on one side of the road) cycle tracks and then reference streets that were parallel to the cycle tracks with the same cross streets as endpoints, subject to the same intersection frequency, cross traffic, car volume and speed. It found the two way on one side of the road lanes safer with a crash rate of 10.5 per million kilometer vs 67 per million kilometer for the reference streets.

green bike boxes which were supposed to be this great panacea to prevent right hooks were found to have at times doubled the rate of collisions in Portland, OR….

To be more accurate…..if you're referencing the older study done by PBOT for the Federal Highway Administration (the only Portland one showing an increase)....the vast majority of those 32 accidents, over 4 years, 81% were right hooks at just a couple of intersections on a couple of streets that were also downhill so people riding were going faster through the intersections than other streets and one with a right turn on-ramp to a freeway. ALL the other streets, the majority, had a safer record, including with right hooks, after the green boxes were painted. With separate signals, no turn on red signs, a slow down sign for bicycles, a $242 fine for an illegal right turn and a prohibition of vehicle right turns at one intersection all those lanes are now safer. Right hooks are a problem for all transportation designers. Montreal, Chicago, Portland etc. have all worked on better designs and are continuing to think through new solutions that can help. My personal bicycle safety measure is to just approach an intersection with caution and make sure I’m seen. I’ve never had a problem while doing that.....if someone wants to just ride fast through an intersection without giving thought to cars possibly making a right turn then my hope is they always make it....unfortunately 88% of that 81% were people who didn't

[OakLeaf]

See though, comparing crash rates on segregated routes vs integrated streets completely misses my point about rider and driver education and behavior. How does the overall crash rate in the census metropolitan area change after segregated routes are added?