Bike Lane Fail #3

This one crosses my mind every morning, on my way to work down Alta Vista. Is there any logic behind having a four-way stop on a street that has a bike lane? Particularly a busy street like Alta Vista?

Generally, I'll obey the rules at a four-way stop when I come across it on a small residential street or country road (I'll pull up, and if I arrive at the same time as a car, the vehicle on the right goes first. Or, to be honest, all the cars go and then I go, because it's just safer and I don't want to hold anyone up, and stopped bikes seem to confuse some drivers.) But you wouldn't put a four-way stop on a multi-lane street. Would you? Just picture it. You arrive at the intersection beside another car, and there's a third car on the cross street. What would you do?

And that's exactly what happens to a bike. Except that you also add the fact that a bike takes much longer to accelerate away from the stop (hence our tendency to treat stop signs like 'yields' - slowing up and looking for oncoming traffic, and stopping fully only if there are other vehicles involved. Now you know.) And if you pull away from the stop at the same time as a car, you're hidden from half the traffic at the intersection... until the car speeds up, at which point you're  now an unexpected bike in the middle of an intersection.

Plus, as far as I know there is no rule governing which vehicle has the right of way at a stop sign if it's on a four-lane street.

What I usually do is go at the same time as the car next to me (making sure, of course, that they're not turning right - don't get me started on the guy that turned right, yesterday, at this very intersection, without signalling. I noticed the car's rightward drift and guessed that he was going to turn, so hit the brakes. But might not have, if he hadn't been clearly edging toward the corner.) I figure it acts as shelter if nothing else. But one day when I did that - slowed up, admittedly without fully stopping, and then cruised through the intersection beside a car that was crossing at the same time as me -  a driver who had been behind me pulled up alongside as I was continuing down the road, to roll his window down and tell me I should have stopped: "a car nearly hit you back there," he said, although I doubt it. Think I would have noticed nearly being hit by a car.

I don't know if there's a solution. But if you think of bikes as traffic, and bike lanes as traffic lanes, there is definitely something awkward and strange about putting a four-way stop in an intersection that amounts to a four-lane road crossing a two-lane. At this particular one, I'd say leave the stop signs up on the generally quiet cross street, and remove the stop signs from Alta Vista. Replace them with yield signs, maybe. Or a traffic circle; seeing as how that stop sign seems, in all honesty, just to be there as a traffic calming measure anyway.

More Bike Lane Fail

I was on my way to work this morning, enjoying the dip in temperatures from the 35+ of most of this month to a more manageable, breezy 23 or so, and went over this spot in the bike lane on Alta Vista.

Now, I go over this spot every morning, pretty much, and most of the time I just swerve out around it and keep on going. But this morning, I happened to be going over it with a great stinking OC Transpo bus passing me, so I couldn't avoid it, and jarred my way over it.

And it occurred to me that not only is this piece of pavement egregiously bad, but it's a patch job over something that was, ostensibly, worse. I vaguely remember this stretch before the half-assed asphalt-slather happened, and I can't really say this is much of an improvement. Look at the bit where the slapped-on asphalt misses filling in the hole by a good eight inches! Look at the sloshes of black tar and grit that sort of got squooshed up against the curb! Check out the scooped ridges just before the white line! It's like this was deliberately indended to be terrible. What is this, some kind of work-to-rule thing on the part of the road crew? Did they have to leave off suddenly and never come back to finish the job? Is this the Mary Celeste of roadwork?

Bike Lane Fail #1

This goes in as Record #1 in my Gallery of Bike Lane Fail. I was on my way through downtown around 1:00 this afternoon when I came across this (at the intersection of Albert and O'Connor.) It was so pathetic a bike lane I had to stop and get a shot. Which took me about 30 seconds, during which time I was nearly clipped, twice, by people swinging across into the turn lane. (Granted, I was stopped, at the left side of the road.)

 

No, the lane does not continue past the intersection. Begging the question: What's the point of its existence at all, really? Does it ever feel, um, inadequate? Purposeless? Does it wake in the middle of the night wondering what it's doing, why it's here, and if it has a greater destiny that it's just, somehow, not fulfilling?

Briefly:

... if you were driving past Billings Bridge Mall this evening around 5:15 or so, and came upon a cyclist at the intersection of Bank and the Billings Transitway exit, holding her bike up with one hand and kicking angrily at a huge ridge of slush and snow that had been thrown out across the bike lane by the plow, breaking it up and shoving the resulting bits of slush to the side of the road with her boot...

... well, that was me. Doing my civic duty.

More about bike lanes

Jonathan, in Montreal, commented on my last post, pointing out that in Montreal where there are segregated bike lanes, the trouble is that they're only separate between intersections: at each intersection you suddenly pop back into traffic, most of which hasn't noticed you because you were off in your own lane, possibly even behind parked cars. (That and where the bike lanes are blocked by something, you have to haul your bike up and over curbs and into traffic that's not used to seeing you there, or get on the sidewalk, neither of which is good.)

I can see that: and a lot of people have been mentioning that the real danger in bike lanes is when they end abruptly, shoving you unexpectedly into traffic. Did anyone see Giacomo Panico's video from last summer of commuting down Albert Street? Where the 'posted bike route' ends, Albert goes from a one-way street to a two-way. Dropping Giacomo, who's been traveling on the left side to stay away from the bus lane, right on the yellow line in two-way traffic with no way off the road. Scary.

Something to remember when designing the bike lanes: making them as continuous as possible. Keeping intersections in mind. Maybe signposting them, too, so cyclists have a sense of where they run, and how to get from point A to point B using safer streets... I know I would happily avoid major arteries if I knew how. One of the problems is all the waterways in Ottawa: bridges concentrate traffic, and so far are prioritized for cars. I see that part of the plan is a bike lane across the Pretoria Bridge, to which I say hallelujah. Especially since cyclists converge in that area to get onto the Canal bike path.

Jonathan's suggestion was to create bike-only streets in places: surprisingly, that's the other motion the transportation committee approved yesterday! There's a proposal to close a few streets leading off Montreal Road in the Vanier area to motor traffic. Wow. Here's hoping.

I'm also just happy to see attention being drawn to increased safety for cyclists in the city. It's too bad it took a year of terrible fatalities to make it happen. I've come across this interactive map of the seven most dangerous intersections in Ottawa for cyclist/car collisions: I use most of these intersections regularly. Elgin and Laurier is a nasty one; Vanier Parkway and Montreal is pretty unpleasant too, although I usually just go straight through it on Montreal, so I don't have to turn. Both of those are scary because there are multiple lanes on both roads, and because cars just don't expect us to merge into left-turn lanes and don't know what to do with us when we do. Notice, too, how many of these dangerous spots are in the general vicinity of bridges: where traffic concentrates. The three or so that aren't are near highway ramps, or on major arteries in suburban areas where the multilane street is the only direct route in a tangle of crescents and residential drives. The bikes wouldn't be there if they had a choice, for the most part: but it's just the easiest, or only, way from point to point. Bike lanes here, separate enough to keep us out of traffic and away from the buses plying those major streets, would be welcome: as long as they don't suddenly end, dropping us in some truly scary situation, which is all too often the case.