How do we go about getting bike lanes for 15th St?

[cannon_fodder]

So you want roads that are 18' wide in each direction so we can have a 6' bike lane?  

The simple answer is: then we won't have bike lanes.  Period.

There isn't room in midtown to do that without the city buying up acre upon acre of people's lawns to put them in.  At $60K an acre, plus the cost of the roadway, it simply isn't going to happen (plus the eminent domain controversy and the expense of moving utilities).  

No lane lines?  First, I don't see how that would be safer - but pretending we have the 6' bike lane on Delaware and wanted to follow that guideline.  11th to 3rd (where the lane runs) is about 3000 feet (.58 miles).  There are 8 streets in that distance.  100 feet in either direction from each and more than half of the street is without markings.  This would be true of everywhere else in the city.

No turning lanes?  No lane markings?  I don't get it.

If you demand no road markings on the approach to every intersection, then bike lanes simply won't happen.

I drive on Delaware everyday in my Pathfinder (full size SUV).  There is room to pass a parked police car (trust me) on that road.  Certainly that is enough room to pass a cyclist in that bike lane (which I can attest to also).  I don't get why having nothing is preferable to having something not up to YOUR standards.

I guess I don't get what you're saying.  You "don't want bike lanes anywhere in Tulsa."  Ok.  Then what's the problem?

I'd love to have routes to be able to bike with my son all over town.  Currently we do it just fine by going through neighborhoods and crossing streets as I was taught when I was a kid.

I'm not trying to brow beat you, though I understands it seems that way. I just don't get what you want.  

/ramble

[Kenosha]

If it were up to me...I would take certain Urban Arterials...those narrow ones like Peoria between 6th and 31st and 31st between Lewis and Riverside, and get rid of a travel lane in each direction, add a turn lane in the middle, and bike lanes on either edge...and sidewalks... especially along 31st.

Complete street.

[tulsamatt]

Here's a video on the Bike Boxes in Portland...



Portland's Green Bike Boxes

[PonderInc]

I don't have Portland envy, I have Amsterdam envy!



Bicycle parking lot at a train station...

[OurTulsa]

YO!!!!

[Ed W]

Copenhagen and Amsterdam are touted as cycling Meccas, but too many of the details are overlooked in the rosy descriptions.  First, gasoline costs at least twice what it does here.  People simply do not drive short distances.  Also, the cities predate the automobile (at least at the city center) so they were built on a pedestrian scale.  People use bicycles for 'fast walking' on relatively short trips.  Away from the city center, attitudes toward cycling are more akin to the common belief here that it's too far, too hard, etc.  Finally, studies of Copenhagen cyclists reveal that while cycle tracks and bike lanes reduce mid-block crashes, they increase collisions at intersections disproportionately.  Also, where cycletracks cross to the right of bus stops, collisions between cyclists and pedestrians increased 1200%.  

We can learn much from what's worked and what's failed in other areas, and frankly bike lanes and cycle tracks are failures in that they do not increase cycling safety.  They merely provide the illusion of safety.  You're asking to spend an enormous amount of public money on what amounts to feel-good measures.  That's bad public policy and bad advocacy.

Riding a bike in traffic isn't an exercise in white knuckle fear, nor is it solely for the adrenaline junkies among us.  It's a skill set that can be learned just as you learned to drive a car.

[deinstein]

Getting rid of curb parking was a pretty hideous idea...but I was just curious if you could have both on Cherry Street as well?

What about curb parking until the area where there is a small turning lane? That seems like a fair compromise for traffic, parking and biking...no?

[Renaissance]

Chicago's North Side incorporates bike lanes and street parking at the same time.  It's not that hard--the bikes just go around a car that happens to be parallel parking, and watch for doors opening.  Next time anybody's there, go check out Clark street between Diversey and Fullerton.  Perfect example.  I'll try to find pictures.

EDIT:  Aha!  This blog has great pictures both for how bike lanes can be laid out and how cars get in the way.  http://chicago.mybikelane.com/

EDIT 2:  This photo is dark but right by where I used to live in Chicago.  It shows how you can lay out a street (Halsted, a pretty busy arterial on the northside) so that there are just two lanes of traffic flanked by two bike lanes and then street parking.  It works great all over Lincoln Park, Lakeview, etc., and really contributes to the feel of the neighborhood.  Would be perfect for Cherry Street.



And yes, cars would sometimes block these lanes.  But that would be illegal, they'd get ticketed, and cyclists would go around them.

[brhino42]

Hi Kenosha,

I ride Peoria and Lewis all the time.  The narrowness really works well for cyclists.  Take the right-hand lane.  Motorists don't want to be over there anyway.  Problem solved.

If the streets were incomplete, wouldn't we fall of the edge?

quote:Originally posted by Kenosha

If it were up to me...I would take certain Urban Arterials...those narrow ones like Peoria between 6th and 31st and 31st between Lewis and Riverside, and get rid of a travel lane in each direction, add a turn lane in the middle, and bike lanes on either edge...and sidewalks... especially along 31st.

Complete street.

[brhino42]

Hi Floyd,

I lived in Austin for 4 years.  Cars block the bike lanes everyday everywhere.  The city makes a tidy revenue from ticketing, but that doesn't stop the practice.  Car-friendly and bike friendly don't have to be opposed, but doorzone bike lanes are a proven hazard...it's the "going around" the parked car that got Dana Laird killed in Cambridge.  Just say no to doorzone bike lanes.  Cyclists out in the lane away from parked cars have reaction time and distance completely unavailable in a doorzone bike lane.

quote:Originally posted by Floyd

Chicago's North Side incorporates bike lanes and street parking at the same time.  It's not that hard--the bikes just go around a car that happens to be parallel parking, and watch for doors opening.  Next time anybody's there, go check out Clark street between Diversey and Fullerton.  Perfect example.  I'll try to find pictures.

EDIT:  Aha!  This blog has great pictures both for how bike lanes can be laid out and how cars get in the way.  http://chicago.mybikelane.com/

EDIT 2:  This photo is dark but right by where I used to live in Chicago.  It shows how you can lay out a street (Halsted, a pretty busy arterial on the northside) so that there are just two lanes of traffic flanked by two bike lanes and then street parking.  It works great all over Lincoln Park, Lakeview, etc., and really contributes to the feel of the neighborhood.  Would be perfect for Cherry Street.



And yes, cars would sometimes block these lanes.  But that would be illegal, they'd get ticketed, and cyclists would go around them.

[akupetsky]

quote:Originally posted by SXSW

quote:Originally posted by akupetsky

quote:Originally posted by tulsa1603

quote:Originally posted by Double A

quote:Originally posted by deinstein

It's hard for Tulsa to market itself or even compete with cities that perfect when it comes to planning.

And I ride 15th all of the time...and I likely drive 15th more than anyone here due to my job.

Traffic would go smoother along Cherry Street with a turning lane, so I don't see how that would complicate traffic.

My question is if it's considered a proper buffer like curb parking is?

Would Cherry Street be better off with no curb parking, two biking lanes and a turning lane? I'm thinking it would be.

Losing on street parking would mean more parking lots. No thanks.

Or worse, declining businesses.  There is a positive psychological effect when people can see parking in front of a business - it is about accessibility.  Also, it gives the impression that there are people in those businesses.  When I drive down 15th between Harvard and Lewis, I don't get that impression.  I get the impression of empty and/or abandoned buildings (of course, half probably are).

We can't get rid of on-street parking.  Although making room for cyclists on Cherry Street would add to the accessibility and business, I'm not sure that you have to do reconstruction to accomplish it.  Why not extend the Riverside-Maple Ridge-Maple Park-Peoria bike path along the BA by carving room out of the unnecessarily-wide service road?  That would leave cyclists only one street away from Cherry Street.

I like this idea.  Extending that trail under Cincinnati and through Maple Park and then across 15th and up to 14th (BA Service Rd.) would provide great access to Cherry Street without actually being on 15th and dealing with the traffic and parked cars.  A dedicated bike lane on 14th could go all the way to Lewis.  Connecting to that trail provides the easiest dedicated bike access to the river.

The trail is already extended to 14th and Peoria (it actually goes on north over the BA and then northwest into the Centennial Park area).  You can just build a spur to go east along 14th.

[Ed W]

I don't see any advantages of eliminating parking along Cherry Street in order to install bike lanes.  As it is, narrow lanes are effective in getting motorists to slow down, something that would clearly be beneficial with all the pedestrian traffic.  And for a cyclist, it's very easy to stay out of the door zone by riding in the right hand tire track of the traffic lane.

[brhino42]

Hi cannon_fodder,

We seem to be miscommunicating.  I don't want 18' lanes.  In fact, I'm having trouble seeing what the agitation for engineering change is all about.  Normally marked roadways with 10 to 12' lanes work very well...on multi-lane roads.  This trend toward reducing the number of lanes is not actually in the cyclists' interest.

We absolutely should not have bike lanes.  Period.  The people who want them want them for two reasons and two reasons only:  because 1) they're afraid of riding in traffic and 2) they want novice riders to feel safer.  Both of these need to be addressed by education, not facilities construction.

The fear largely arises from motorists approaching from the flank.  Every responsible bit of research on the subject says the car-bike rear-end collision is the LEAST common kind of car-bike accident.  Much less than for car-car.  This isn't a feeling or an opinion. 80% of car-bike collisions happen at intersections, and an even greater percentage happen IN FRONT of the cyclist or from the side.  Bike lanes only exist to counter the least common kind of accident and aggravate all other forms.

This leads us to the next component of the fear--the idea that cyclists don't really belong out there and that they can't compete with motor traffic.  Traffic is primarily a form of cooperation; the system breaks down when competition becomes intense.  So drivers may be aggravated, but they know what the rules of the road look like, and that they have the best chance of getting where they're going if they cooperate.  Sometimes people will tell stories of how they were hit, and upon further inquiry, it turns out they were curb-hugging, sidewalk-schlepping, wrong-way riding, weaving in and out of parked cars, or disobeying traffic signals.  So while it's hard to argue with people's emotions, the actual behavior is the problem.  And anyone who has ridden RiverParks knows that trails don't make for better behavior.  In cities with bike lanes, cyclist misbehavior continues unabated.

The fear is not rational and shouldn't drive transportation policy or design.  Cyclist education, not facilities construction, is the answer.  I am so confident of this solution, that I have taught hundreds of people to ride in traffic, including my mom and my sister (and beware, wise-crackers, I'm not trying to pare down my family!)

Regarding Delaware:  a 4-lane solution was presented to the city, which opted instead for 5-lanes in too small a space (we are counting those bike lanes as traffic lanes, right?).  One of my buddies watched a Bama semi-truck headed south on Delaware.  It was as far left as possible and still ran onto the bike lane stripe.  That's a safety issue and an indicator of bad design, especially since facilitating BAMA access on Delaware was major consideration in the road "upgrade."

We could have had something just as nice to look at, but safer and more useful, not to mention in keeping with the on-street bike route design adopted by the city for ALL OTHER implementations city-wide starting in 2002.  Why this deviation?  Politics and money.

quote:Originally posted by cannon_fodder

So you want roads that are 18' wide in each direction so we can have a 6' bike lane?  

The simple answer is: then we won't have bike lanes.  Period.

There isn't room in midtown to do that without the city buying up acre upon acre of people's lawns to put them in.  At $60K an acre, plus the cost of the roadway, it simply isn't going to happen (plus the eminent domain controversy and the expense of moving utilities).  

No lane lines?  First, I don't see how that would be safer - but pretending we have the 6' bike lane on Delaware and wanted to follow that guideline.  11th to 3rd (where the lane runs) is about 3000 feet (.58 miles).  There are 8 streets in that distance.  100 feet in either direction from each and more than half of the street is without markings.  This would be true of everywhere else in the city.

No turning lanes?  No lane markings?  I don't get it.

If you demand no road markings on the approach to every intersection, then bike lanes simply won't happen.

I drive on Delaware everyday in my Pathfinder (full size SUV).  There is room to pass a parked police car (trust me) on that road.  Certainly that is enough room to pass a cyclist in that bike lane (which I can attest to also).  I don't get why having nothing is preferable to having something not up to YOUR standards.

I guess I don't get what you're saying.  You "don't want bike lanes anywhere in Tulsa."  Ok.  Then what's the problem?

I'd love to have routes to be able to bike with my son all over town.  Currently we do it just fine by going through neighborhoods and crossing streets as I was taught when I was a kid.

I'm not trying to brow beat you, though I understands it seems that way. I just don't get what you want.  

/ramble

[PonderInc]

Anybody catch this story in the Tulsa World about internet mapping sites offering "best routes" for walking/cycling?

It's based on the premise that the best bike/pedestrian routes are not necessarily the same as the best auto routes.  (This is most obvious in the case of pedestrians, who don't care about one-way streets, and both cyclists/pedestrians, who can utilize off-street trails.)  Cool idea.  Needs lots of local input to work.

When I used to bike a lot, I would ride on an arterial street, a bike trail, several secondary streets, a parking lot, and an alley to get to work.  Not the typical Mapquest route from Pt A to Pt B...but the one that offered a good mix of safety and efficiency from the cyclist's point of view.

[SXSW]

I wanted to revisit this thread.  There is room for a bike lane on both sides of 15th from Riverside all the way to at least Utica where businesses have on-street parking and the far right lanes are rarely used.  The bike lanes would be placed in those far right lanes next to the 'lane' for parked cars.  I didn't think there was room but on closer inspection there is, even with SUV's parked on the street.  The city sure isn't going to do this work but if others are interested we could get city approval and do it ourselves.  Same for 11th Street in the future, which is set up like 15th.