Transportation | Design
About the Bike Lanes
When the roadways are a wild west
The Sunday Dispatch ~ October 29, 2023
Bike lanes.
You see them in random display, sometimes with continuous design, sometimes with stops and starts that baffle the observer.
Bicyclists can use the bike lanes for increased safety, but they can still ride on regular roadways as legal traffic. Rules vary by state, of course. Where I live, bicyclists must obey all regular traffic laws and ride no more than two abreast on the roadway. So you can choose you own adventure, depending on how you feel about riding a bicycle on roads or in protected lanes.
Whenever I ride my bike, I tend towards the safer margins where they are available. But not all bicyclists are the same. We have different risk tolerances and different behaviors when out riding. Some aren’t so great.
Someone recently shared with me a story about a person traveling on a bicycle down a hill, not in the designated bike lane, but in the wrong lane altogether, into oncoming traffic.
So, you know, picking up lots of speed and heading into possible collision.
When a car suddenly turned onto the street, instead of the bicyclist correcting their mistake, they…
