Originally Posted by
Bekologist
Even some of the most ardent local bike lane skeptics admit they see the value in well placed climbing bike lanes on seattle's significant uphills.
The end result of the hybrid designs seen in seattle result in a better street, in some regards better than sharrows alone would.
This is my opinion riding streets with increasingly well thought-out bike lane and sharrow placements.
One thing to consider about all the new street architecture is to think of how the least abled bicyclist -elderly, mobility limited - would be riding the street at 10 miles an hour. Seattle's hybrid designs make a lot of sense on a lot of streets i've been riding.
It's a really good point. Bike lane as climbing lane makes pretty good sense. The converse is that bike lanes are a problem on downhill sections. And the uphill-downhill thing is the problem that SF was addressing with all their sharrow activity in the last decade. I like to think I might have had a tiny part in the evolution of sharrows there as I was involved in some discussion of these very issues with the head of the SFBC years ago as they were figuring all this out.
I'm really glad to see the Denver Arrow come back home, all grown up and barely recognizable from its original incarnation. Good stuff.
Denver is basically a flat city and I can't think of any road sections here where a bike lane would be more useful than the new sharrows.