The Star's Jon Murray has an article this morning on the miles and miles of new bike lanes the city has created.
"You may have heard the grumbles throughout winter as Indianapolis drivers navigated around slivers of streets marked off for miles and miles with freshly painted bike lanes. And, often, not a bicyclist in sight.
"As prime cycling weather takes hold --and as motorists grapple with what the sometimes-confusing markings and sympointbols all mean --now comes the test for the city's newly expanded 64-mile network of on-street bikeways: Will bicyclists start using them?"
I wouldn't count on it. Most cyclists I've spoken with are planning on avoiding the routes. The term "death trap" has often been used to describe the new paths. As the Star article points out, the paths are confusing, especially to motorists. That confusion is bound to increased car vs. bicycle police reports being completed.
Read the whole article here:
Its just a matter of time before someone is killed in front of Broad Ripple Park on 62nd street
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that it's very difficult to design safe bike lanes. You often end up making the bicycling experience more dangerous, not less. In community after community you see the bicycling community split on whether bike lanes are a good idea. Here though we don't have a debate. We have the recreational bicycling community, people from groups like IndyCog, which has the ear of the Mayor and he won't listen to anyone else. Most serious bicycle commuters I know avoid the bike lanes because they're more dangerous. For example, downtown Indy has always been a very safe place to bicycle. The streets are wide and it's easy to keep up with traffic. Instead of that, you create bike lanes, reducing the manueverability of the bike on the streets and narrowing all the traffic lanes. In many cases those bike lanes run right next to parked cars, which is an extremely dangerous place to ride. Broad Ripple is a good example. There is already a sidewalk there bicyclists use. The sidewalk could have been widened and upgraded to being a pedestrian, bicycle trail. But instead, they took away two traffic lanes to create bike lanes nobody uses.
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