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Reading between the lines, Mike McMenamin’s responses regarding road width and parking are troubling.

We know the effect of road width on driver behavior: the wider the road, the faster people will drive. So width per se is detrimental to bicycle safety, not contributive. Wide roads encourage drivers to speed, thus scaring bicyclists away from using the roads and increasing the danger to pedestrians attempting to cross them.

He sounds overly interested in maintaining or even augmenting existing parking. The reason Arlington is perceived to have a parking shortage is because parking is underpriced, so quantity demanded naturally exceeds the supply. In order to ensure readily available parking in the busiest corridors, you need to price it high enough that many people will choose alternatives. The relationship of parking policy with bicycle safety is simple: bicycle safety varies inversely with the number of parking spaces. Every existing parking space makes bicycling a little bit more dangerous and a less attractive transportation option; every removal of a parking space would help to accomplish the opposite.

“True champion”? :rolleyes:

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Your route from Fairfax to Nokesville looks good. I personally do not think I’d be comfortable riding on the long stretch of VA-28 beyond Nokesville. Sightlines are generally good, but traffic volumes and speeds are high, and the shoulder may not be reliable. I don’t know if there is a good alternative route.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been out that way in over a year, and never by bicycle.

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Me: riding westbound up Wilson Blvd through Clarendon, just past 4pm yesterday
You: well-dressed gentleman hiding in SUV with tinted windows parked on the right side in the last spot before Fillmore St

Nice try. Your timing, albeit a hair early, would have sufficed. But your door wasn’t long enough to reach me across the white line. :p

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@Terpfan 125087 wrote:

My favorite:

“The graffiti on the streets does not help our property values,” declared Aileen Oya.”

I’d guess that the bike lanes, if anything, would increase property values…

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Union and Royal Streets quickly lose their appeal if one is required to put a foot down at every stop sign. I always do a careful Idaho, and most of the time there is no one to yield to.

If Alexandria PD is serious about enforcing foot-down stops on these heavily traveled bike routes, I’ll take a lane on Washington Street instead.

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@hozn 124543 wrote:

that looks like a pretty calm street; riding around the van — into the actual lane [shudder!] — looks like it would probably not result in instant death. At least in this one case.

Haha. In fact, the previous block (Arlington Mill to Campbell) is an especially egregious door-zone bike lane: the median there makes it impossible for most vehicles to pass bicyclists with three feet of clearance if those bicyclists are riding out of the door zone. So riders using this road should ideally have already been using the lane.

@hozn 124568 wrote:

I don’t see this as qualitatively different than a car double parked in a double lane (i.e. blocking the right lane). Pretty frequent occurrence (granted, especially in the city). It’s not like the bike is left without any options here (take the damn lane like any other vehicle or walk on the sidewalk!). I rather doubt the behavior of the police would be any different.

You think the police would not place a higher priority on clearing a blocked car lane than a blocked bike lane? http://whosblockinglsttoday.tumblr.com/ (Side note: I’m surprised to see that blog apparently has not been updated in over a year.)

@lordofthemark 124573 wrote:

As for needing lanes everywhere – no we do not need lanes on every single quiet residential street. This street is not that. As I pointed out above it connects Shirlington, one of Arlington’s “urban villages” with North Fairlington (and I think some take it to get to South Fairlington, and it is an alternative to I395 to get to Park Center) and it has several bus routes. There are lots of people who can ride on a quiet residential street, who will appreciate a bike lane on street like this.

I doubt there’s any more traffic on this block than there is on 31st just past Randolph. I’d guess that people coming from Randolph are more likely to turn right than left (and vice versa for the opposite direction). Yet that’s a sharrows with a substantial hill climb. So those who will use bike lanes but not sharrows aren’t likely to be riding here anyway. Plus, in my judgment, relative to other similar facilities in Arlington, traffic is already extremely calm on this stretch of S Quincy / 31st.

@TwoWheelsDC 124569 wrote:

And frankly, I think there comes a point where having a lot of bike lanes–particularly on roads that don’t really need them to ensure cyclists’ safety–sends the wrong message, namely that bikes need to stick to the small strips of pavement expressly provided for them and not ride anywhere else. Traffic calming, speed enforcement, and education are actual solutions to the problem. Bike lanes are (mostly) a band-aid.

Based on the photos above, the bike lane probably wasn’t put there out of any necessity…that lane is wide as hell and traffic speeds are relatively low. That bike lane almost certainly was put there because it was easy (economically and politically), and then the county gets to say it’s expanding bike infrastructure.

This!

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@Steve O 124567 wrote:

Hey, that’s a great tip! I didn’t realize there was a connection from that side. Easy to miss when you travel under the bridge. (street view)

How do you turn right onto Ohio Drive there? Do you pass the intersection on the sidewalk, and then turn around and merge left through the outbound traffic? I guess you could do so at the crosswalk?

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@Steve O 124508 wrote:

would it be good to add flexi-bollards, too?

Who are you, and what have you done with Steve O?

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Sorry, I apologize for the insult.

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@jrenaut 124457 wrote:

I don’t think sharrows are EVER the right design choice. They have no legal distinction – they’re simply a reminder that cyclists have a right to be in the road, too.

Ah, now I see what you mean. This topic is now dovetailing with a similar discussion in another thread recently. So, using that philosophy, you’d prefer that Sherman Ave just not have any bicycle markings at all (since it’s too narrow for a bike lane)?

They’re insulting, like the beg buttons at crosswalks. They’re a reminder that drivers don’t know or follow the law.

Insulting? If only drivers’ collective intelligence were high enough that it could be taken as an insult.

In the recent past, even this sign seemed necessary to someone:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]9663[/ATTACH]

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@Steve O 124447 wrote:

I generally stay in the buffered lane in the Clarendon/Courthouse area; that usually feels like plenty of space, but I definitely take the lane on the cannonball.

Time of day makes a difference there, too. Morning commute time has a lot less pedestrian activity and people parking, getting in and out of cars, etc. Evening is a whole different dynamic along there.

Yes, this is probably a time of day phenomenon. I don’t commute through there. My experience with Clarendon Blvd is mostly afternoons and evenings, when there is a lot of parking turnover and there’s a standing vehicle impeding the buffered bike lane roughly every block or two. Plus at that hour there isn’t much eastbound thru traffic: many of the vehicles are only on the road for a few blocks at a time. So I often pass more vehicles (slow-moving drivers probably looking for parking or their destinations) than there are vehicles passing me.

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@jrenaut 124427 wrote:

Sherman Ave NW … has sharrows … I, along with every other cyclist on the road, treat it like it has a bike lane.

I hate sharrows. They’re a constant reminder that motorists don’t know the law and don’t give a crap about my safety.

I don’t know if I have a point here other than “sharrows suck”.

I don’t follow. Perhaps your beef with the design is simply about the road width itself rather than the choice of painting sharrows vs. bike lanes? If, in order to stay out of the door zone, you have to ride far enough left to prevent legal passing in the lane, it sounds like sharrows are the better design choice.

OTOH, if people are trying to drive 45MPH, the road could use traffic calming (speed humps, islands in the middle of intersections).

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@dasgeh 124363 wrote:

If the law is 3′, doesn’t it seem wrong to build infrastructure that implies it’s ok for a car to pass a bike if it’s in its lane?

Are you implying that the existence of painted lines on the road (to set aside space for bikes) gives drivers an excuse to ignore anything that isn’t actually in their lane, and that this might lead to closer passes than would occur if the line were absent? Interesting. Such infrastructure does make me a bit more deferential to passing auto traffic and less confident to claim the full lane when necessary.

@dasgeh 124363 wrote:

has anyone ever seen any tickets in Arlington for a motor vehicle parked partially in the bike lane? Or parked entirely in the bike lane?

Not me. But when I encounter such vehicles, I look for traffic and try to figure out how to safely get around. Checking to see if the offending vehicle has a ticket doesn’t register as a priority!

@lordofthemark,
You are right: the relative probabilities and expected risks for each choice of riding position are a function of both rider velocity and parking turnover rate. I would guess that someone riding slowly is less likely to be doored, less likely to be seriously injured if doored, and more likely to be hit from behind than a faster rider. I find that I am constantly adjusting my riding position depending on these factors.

For instance, on Military Road, I generally take the lane on the downhills but use the bike lanes on the uphills. But even there, I try to adjust my speed in order to stagger conflicts so that I can merge into the vehicle lane when passing a parked car on an uphill. Of course that may not be a great example since there aren’t too many vehicles parked there, so I can sometimes use the parking lane for climbing.

On Clarendon Blvd, I will take the lane all the way from Highland Street down to Rosslyn. Even uphill on Wilson I take the lane in most places. Too much parking turnover, and a lot of people open doors without looking. Those two streets seem like good examples of well-intentioned but effectively useless bicycle-specific facilities.

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@chris_s 124343 wrote:

In a typical row of parked cars, 10′ is a safe assumption for how far an open car door will protrude from the curb. Typical parking lanes in Arlington are 7 to 8′ so the whole 5′ isn’t door-zone, but the majority of it is.

One assumption I find questionable in that study: tires of parked vehicles will be six inches from the curb. I believe the law in Virginia is that you must be within 18 inches. But a lot of folks can’t even seem to manage that. Is this ever enforced?

@chris_s 124343 wrote:

A lot of people will ride bike lanes, even door-zone bike lanes much more happily than they will sharrows. Does the increased safety that comes from the increase in # of cyclists negate the decreased safety of having folks riding in the door zone?

This is a great question. IMO, it’s an education problem though. Many people greatly overestimate the dangers of sharing low-speed roads with motor vehicles, yet they are unafraid of car doors (and possibly don’t even realize this is a risk). How many people feel perfectly safe on our highways but are afraid to fly anywhere (while statistics show they are much safer in the air)? I can’t count the number of times I’ve cringed seeing people riding much too close to parked cars.

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@chris_s 124343 wrote:

It doesn’t really apply to my first suggestion, because a NB bike lane would not be adjacent to parked cars. It’s perhaps worth creating a new thread if people want to explore this more generalized topic in any more detail so as to leave this one for talk of Crystal Drive specifically.

Sorry for the confusion. I was actually thinking about the southbound bike lane (15′ between yellow line and parked cars) when I wrote that.

I agree it would be preferable to start a new thread. I’ll do that with my original question. Can the moderators copy the responses in?

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