Originally Posted by
AngeloDolce
Many of ttraffic planners I've spoken to explicitly stated that they were willing accept the risk of being doored but were not comfortable enough to ride in the middle of the lane and expect cars wait to pass when it is safe. They told me in no uncertain terms the door zone bike lane is the standard, and sharrows will not be considered anywhere they can fit a bike lane (i.e. anywhere motorists stay out of the door zone, then they can install a bike lane).
Others have flat out denied that a motorist can be required to yield to any bicyclist when there is a bike lane (e.g. bicyclist going straight on green, motorist going right or straight on red). They dismissed sections of the traffic code that contradicted this. Strangely, some of them recognized that a bicyclist would be able to use the lane and have the right of way if no bike lane were striped.
While I agree that the risk of dooring is much lower for a planner that rides 200 miles a year at 12mph than for a commuter riding 4000-5000 miles per year, these facilities seem to be designed to remove assertive bicyclists, not to encourage more bicycle travel.
Morally, I agree with you that the door zone lanes are an abomination; practically and legally both planners and advocates seem to oppose putting sharrows on roads with speeds over 15-20mph, and say that since few bicyclists use major roads those bicyclists that do should not use them (but can't come up with alternate access to these destinations). The door zone lanes would be safe if bicyclists would just walk their bikes.
I think real crash data numbers need to be compiled on door zone crashes and overtaking crashes on the urban street types where door zone lanes are often considered. In the urban areas that I've looked at, overtaking collisions are extremely rare on downtown streets, especially if the speed limit is 25mph or less, and/or the cyclist isn't riding at night without any rear lighting/reflectors.
Dooring data seems to be harder to come by. Some cities simply don't collect it; others don't have many door zone bike lanes or travel lane configurations that encourage door zone cycling. Yet other cities like San Francisco report dooring as either the first or second most common crash type.
But once accurate data allows the safety of center-of-downtown-travel-lane use to be compared to door zone bike lane use, I believe this will be a serious indignment of door zone bike lanes, and force the traffic engineering establishment to take notice, modifying both the FHWA guidelines and the MUTCD to strongly discourage them. The non-PE traffic planners will take longer to convince than the engineers, however, since they are motivated by social issues and many of them believe that encouraging novices to cycle in the door zone is the only way to get them to ride bikes, and they believe that door zone cycling is better for society than motoring, despite the fact that channeling cyclists into the door zone is really pro-motoring, anti-bicyclist.