Originally Posted by
zephyr
One thing I read that sounds odd in this article was the proposal to "paint the bicycle lanes bright green" approaching an intersection. Paint the whole bike lane bright green? In Seattle, a somewhat hilly place where the streets are often wet and slippery 8+ months of the year? What would happen when a cyclist has to grab the brakes to a stop at a red light?
It's quite easy to make colored road surfaces with good grip. For instance these days some roads in the UK are all sorts of colors - red bus lanes, green, yellow bits... (Anyway, a painted road wouldn't be much more slippery than a lot of the worn aggregate concrete roads in Seattle. Ever watched people trying to drive up Queen Anne Hill on a wet day?)
There are other things which seem other-worldly in comparison to the shoddy, badly designed and maintained US roads. The lead-up to almost every traffic light in the UK has a Shellgrip (tm) surface - extra grippy surface for the inevitable hurried stops, to prevent accidents. Not bike related, but they also have introduced colored reflectors, so driving on the motorway (freeway) you have green, amber, red, white reflectors depending on what they mean: left road edge, lane divider, right road edge, on/off ramp divider...
Road technology, design and maintenance in the US is very shoddy and primitive in comparison. Our expectations are pathetically low. I'm not sure whether we spend too little, or just get very poor value for our spending. Given here in MA we have the highest per-mile spend in the country, endemic corruption, and spectacularly bad roads, I suspect the latter.