From whose perspective? If it's the ones I am thinking of, imagine painting a white line 3 ft from the edge of the shoulder of the side of an expressway, and calling it a cycle lane.

Which side of the fog line are you painting this new line? And what is the result?

Again, if it's the ones I saw recently, the new line is painted 3ft to the left of the existing solid line (i.e. would be to the right of the line in the US, because Oz and the US drive on the opposite sides). In other words, they're splitting the emergency/stopping lane. The result for drivers is no change.

I've been looking for a photo online but can't find one. Sorry.

OK, so part of the shoulder is now called a BL. What is the difference/improvement?

Al

Most motorists think they are always experiencing some kind of emergency.

And they already drive in bike lanes wide enough for them to fit through.

Small improvement for cyclists for apparently a huge amount of money: they are now entitled to risk their lives by riding up the side of an expressway.

I'm not exactly sure what point you're making/what you're disagreeing with me about, if anything. :confused:

Here in Orange County, CA nearly every major through street within a 20 or 30 mile radius of where I live has a generous 3 to 5 foot shoulder between the curb and the right hand lane. Nearly all of these streets prohibit parking along the side of the road, so the shoulder serves as a place for a car to pull over in an emergency. Nearly all of these wide shoulders are also marked as bike lanes, which probably costs the county a measly few extra dollars to paint "Bike Lane" every few hundred yards, and near most intersections. I know Orange County has a well deserved reputation as a car mecca, but honestly for a county of 3.5 million, it is one of the better metro areas for cycling that I have lived in. One more thing, a lot of the nearby cities have street sweeping machines that go along the shoulders / bike lanes of these through streets to keep litter from reaching the storm drains (and going into the local watershed when we have rain). As a result, these bike lanes stay generally free of a lot of debris, and it reduces the chances of getting flats. Those street sweepers are my good buddies.

I have a hill I have to go up and one day there were about 5 kids in the middle of my lane. I merged into the right lane from the shoulder. The kid yelled watch out theres a car behind you!! Then again he probably wasn't even old enough to even know the driving laws either.

....

What Denver, Colorado do YOU live in??? It's certainly not the same one I live in! The ONLY time I've ridden on an MUP and not passed other cyclists is in the dead of night or during a snow storm.... and even then I sometimes see them!

Denver has some AWESOME MUP's for getting around... one of the best networks of on and off street paths/routes that I've ever seen.

Same thing here. I am fortunate to have what is considered one of the best Rails-to-Trails in the country here(Withlacoochee State Trail). It's a beautiful trail, but it doesn't really GO anywhere. It parallels a main road but it doesn't branch or fork. I suppose if you're lucky enough to live and work along the trail it's great, but otherwise it's just for recreation. Same for the trail along the Suncoast Parkway, except that one's totally isolated and only accessible from trailheads.

Perhaps true in Raleigh, but in Durham the ATT connects suburban neighborhoods with downtown, and provides urban areas with nearby access to RTP. Along the way there are a couple of interchanges with major highways with bike lanes, and downtown it's not hard to connect with other streets that are pretty bike-friendly. It'll be even more useful when the bridge over I-40 is built.

Looking at the online map of Raleigh greenways, I can see what you mean about "strictly recreational."

Are you saying that cyclist were prohibited from using this road prior to the stripe of paint being added?

Seems that all that was needed was a lifting of the prohibition.

The discussion was how a stripe to the outside of a fog line, effectively dividing a shoulder does anything of any practical benefit to for a cyclist. I can thing of none. There are only negatives to this in the US actually as part of the shoulder now becomes part of the roadway meaning cyclist must by law ride in it with some exceptions. Previously the cyclist could decide for themselves where the best place to ride was, the outer travel lane or the shoulder.

So instead of lifting prohibition, a stripe had to be added? Seems a big waste.

Al

I do think Raleigh is improving. They have all these little Greenways that don't connect up well, and therefore aren't that useful, but they have plans that will link a lot of them up. But even with that, what they're going to end up with is large loop around downtown. For it to be truly useful they need some spokes in that wheel that allow you to head in towards downtown from various points on that giant loop. I have and do use the greenways for transportation often, but equally as often there's no path that goes where I need to be. But if they'd ever finish (start?) the House Creek Greenway, I might be able to work it into my daily commute and keep off the streets for a good part of the trip.

But then there's the fact that most of the greenways are officially (although often not actually) closed at "dusk," which again limits their usefulness when commuting.

Cyclist in Durham fought that fight over the ATT, too; there's a thread mentioning it in this forum somewhere. There are still some signs that say the trail's open dawn to dusk, but the official hours are now 5 AM - 10 PM.

The sticking point seems to be whether the greenway is considered a park, or part of the city's transportation infrastructure. The ATT gets miniature street sweepers and pretty good regular maintenance, from what I've seen.

When I lived in Bakersfield CA the newspaper reported that a bike path extension being built was going to cost $100,000 per 100 feet. I don't know if the paper got that wrong or not; but it struck me odd at the time because I was having a rear patio put in, and thought that if the city put my patio in it would have cost me about $100,000 instead of the $2500, and my patio was cement and the bike path was blacktop which is cheaper then cement. Governments just try to find ways to spend lots of taxpayers money for stuff that could have been done far cheaper.

That bike path in Bakersfield Ca is 32 miles long...you do the math!!!

Heh....you know, I would LOVE to see that....maybe when gas gets up to $10.00/gal., we'll see a mass of peoples getting out of their suv's and onto the bikes....forcing this type of thinking....who knows?...

They already pay this in many parts of the world and they don't rush in masses onto bikes.

Maybe not "rush in masses," but ridership does seem to be higher in some areas that also have higher gas prices. It'd be interesting to plot that out somehow and see if there really is a strong correlation between gas prices and percentage of bicycling commuters. Of course many areas also have good public transportation, so even if people were less inclined to drive, they may still not bike. But it'd be a curious set of statistics to see.

It's a funny thing with the Epping Road cycleway - for the past year a section of the M2 cycleway has been closed so that an extra car lane could be constructed. The alternate route given to cyclists is longer (8.59km compared to 6.84km on M2), hillier (184m climbed vs 55m) which results in a longer commute time. Also it is not to the same standard as the M2 (open to us for the past 10 years).

So yes, there is a car lane being squeezed on Epping Rd, but a cycle lane has disappered from the M2.

http://advocacy.bikenorth.org.au/m2/

Argh its a crazy world...

I think you're missing the point of what the road is - it's a big, high-speed divided highway, like this:
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~krool/phot...0Motorway7.jpg

It's not safe for cyclists to ride up the side (where the white car is parked) of that, and adding a line of paint (at apparently significant expense) does nothing to change that!

^^Why not?

I see a speed limit sign that says 100 km/h (62 mph).

I ride a two narrow lane, opposing directions, 60 mph speed limit highway every day that I ride to work. With nothing like the paved shoulders that highway has. And another two narrow lane highway that has a 55 mph speed limit with no paved shoulders.

The highway in the above photo would be a piece of cake. There's not even any opposing direction traffic to watch for.

Maybe we are making the same basic point: The added stripe does not improve conditions for cyclists.

Which is why I said it was a waste of money.

Al

I'm sure we're all very impressed, but that doesn't sound remotely safe. An encounter with a vehicle under such conditions could easily prove fatal. Leaving aside stories about "this one time" where someone was killed in a 25 mph zone, the link between speed and fatalities inside cars is well established, and it doesn't get any prettier when a bike is on the receiving end.

Sometimes creative use of existing roads works great -- adding a bike lane to a wide, residential street often works well as a traffic calming measure, and the resulting drop in driver speed is probably the best thing for traffic safety all around. (I often avoid the bike lanes anyway, but that's been hashed out in other threads.) Plopping a line on a highway strikes me as nothing more than a token gesture.

You're not even supposed to sit in a disabled car on the shoulder/emergency lane of an expressway, so why would you want to ride a bike in one? Meanwhile, I am assuming that the road you're riding on has at-grade junctions etc i.e. that you're not going to be crossing an exit ramp for 200 ft when you're trying to go straight on and there's a car pulling off at 60mph.

Of course not, that is why one should wait for a gap in traffic before crossing an exit ramp.

http://members.cox.net/ncutcdbtc/freeway/bkfwcr02.pdf

Al