Originally Posted by
RobertHurst
The current MUTCD standards say to center the sharrow at least 11 feet from the curb on streets with side parking, and just a few feet from the curb on streets without parking. I don't think sharrows really need to be in the centers of lanes on most streets, but these standards put the sharrow too far right by about one foot. That single foot makes a huge difference. In Denver we've seen sharrows centered 12 feet from the curb that seem very effective and pro-cyclist; on the same streets are badly placed sharrows, centered 10 feet from the curb, which seem much too close to parked cars. The city has promised to repaint them eventually at 12 feet.
The sharrows have been improved greatly but are also still too small, imo. The current standard is one meter by three meters. The ideal sharrow I think would be about 2 meters wide and 5 meters long. It sounds a lot bigger than it really would be on the street. I would be curious to find out how sharrows work on all different kinds of streets, but I doubt we ever will.
+1 . Robert mentions sharrow size as needing to be marginally larger, like a foot larger and a foot further left..
Seattles' sharrows have been developing, the ones seen in the 'sharrows too far right?' video have been supplanted on some streets by nearly center of the lane sharrows that are a bit larger and a foot or so further left.
as sharrow standards develop in the US, I hope a foot or two larger and a foot or two further left gets codified in future MUTCD, current minimum sizes are just too small to be maximally effective.