The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

I tried to make it from my apartment downtown to 71st and Yale.  It was a pretty scary experience trying to bike along 71st street.  And I'm a very confident cyclist who has ridden for years in Chicago, Boston, and even India.

Is there a reason 71st street needs to be a 7 lane superhighway?  And if it does, why are there no alternative east west ways across Tulsa south of I-44?  There are literally no straight roads to take you from the river to Yale that arent' super high speed.

Anyway, something they should consider fixing if they are serious about this whole bike friendly thing.  You can make downtown as bike friendly as you want but if there's no safe way to bike to downtown then its all kind of a pointless exercise.

Drive 71st from Lewis to 169.  That will answer your question.  I avoid 71st like the plague now.  I rarely get south of 51st unless it's to visit my brother in Broken Arrow.

Have you looked at the INCOG maps:

http://incog.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2a173b86136c4f96adafb641f5c4cb01

I ride down from 31st and Peoria to a buddy's house close to 71st and Harvard on a regular basis using the bike streets.  It's not the most direct route, but it works well and keeps me out of traffic.  Using those routes, I would think you could get to 71st and Yale and avoid the major arteries.   (Although, North of 71st between Yale and Sheridan is kind of an island.)


 

Also,   anytime I'm trying to figure out how to get someplace that is not obvious to me, I check the Strava Heat Maps.  All bike rides on Strava are uploaded and they create maps showing where people ride.   If the route is "hot" it is where a lot of riders ride, and so is probably a good route to go on:

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#12/-95.94309/36.05507/blue/bike

I'm not trying to be a smartass but who is this "they" you've mentioned?

My wife bikes from our house, just south of downtown, to work, between 61st and 71st and Yale, every once in a while.  She turns off the river trail at 56th, I believe, and uses it to go east.  I think she has to get up to 55th St after she crosses Lewis, in order to get over Joe Creek at Manion Park.  She turns to the south just west of Yale and gets to work through the neighborhood.  I can get the exact route, if you think you want to try it.

Great googly moogly! I would never ride on 71st Street. I'm very comfortable riding in traffic... but 71st is hardly car friendly, let alone bike friendly.

Using Strava heat maps is a good review if you don't know the area. Google maps also has a quality mapping tool that uses bike routes and paths. The route from downtown to Woodland Hills using Google (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.1473876,-95.9933968/Tulsa,+OK/36.063044,-95.8800614/@36.1171012,-95.9736017,12.25z/data=!4m10!4m9!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x87b692b8ddd12e8f:0xe76910c81bd96af7!2m2!1d-95.992775!2d36.1539816!1m0!3e1) makes sense to me looking it over... but for the suicide run down Sheridan. But you can easily modify the route:

I would probably ride this route. (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.1473621,-95.9931007/36.0636518,-95.8809585/@36.0782777,-95.9280179,13.33z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m10!3m4!1m2!1d-95.9314227!2d36.1541951!3s0x87b6ed05e3e06073:0x26ff14b34bbffef!3m4!1m2!1d-95.9158283!2d36.0994032!3s0x87b692befb7c2a9d:0xbdb7d7646967973e!1m0!3e1) It utilizes bike route (share the road) fairly heavily and avoids major streets.

An alternative route heavily utilizes the Riverside and Creek bike paths (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.1471546,-95.9931896/36.0633337,-95.8798403/@36.0569103,-95.9370577,13z/data=!4m24!4m23!1m20!3m4!1m2!1d-95.9666659!2d36.0475083!3s0x87b693eb7a637ccd:0x4c736d2365007233!3m4!1m2!1d-95.8626041!2d36.0261201!3s0x87b68e7a5c6a0abf:0x2546dfb86baa067e!3m4!1m2!1d-95.8605459!2d36.060994!3s0x87b68db3f219c393:0x653ae8fc35bcc48c!3m4!1m2!1d-95.8643962!2d36.06692!3s0x87b68dae35336a11:0x5df76f31f179237d!1m0!3e1). You then have to weave your way through the Best Buy parking lot and behind Union to come into Woodland Hills without the eminent threat of death, but it is a fairly decent route. If you want to use the paths, this is the way to go for sure. Might be a better ride than the one I'd take, but not nearly as direct.

71st is a lousy bike route. It isn't pedestrian friendly in the slightest either. Its the kind of place that you get in your car to go to the next store over.

"They" is the Great Mysterious Powers That Be. 


I don't think they have an email address.

I’ve taken that same route before, works great.  You can turn south from 56th at New Haven, Marion, or Urbana and cross from there and pick up the road to the west of Kirk Of The Hills further South.

Ah...yeah, I believe "They" moved to Portland.

Those that are left own asphalt companies and have strong tree pollen allergies.

We should do a critical mass on 71st.

71st street fascinates me because the lanes appear to be at least 15' wide.  All you'd have to do is shrink these to 11' and you'd have oodles of room to create protected bike lanes along several miles of this street.  I was just thinking about this the other day, when I noticed that you could almost fit two cars side by side in a single lane. (I'm exaggerating, but not much.)

This would also help the pedestrian experience, since the sidewalks directly abut this superhighway.  Ugh!  Terrifying just to walk on these sidewalks with cars roaring by your shoulder! 

(http://www.accidentalurbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/image-1024x592.jpeg)

I agree with your sentiment, but measuring the lanes on Google Earth shows the each direction is allotted 37' with no true shoulders. The lanes are 12' lanes.  You could squeeze what I call a "Florida style bike lane" in, which is basically a 3' shoulder they call a bike lane.

But I sure wouldn't want to use that: if I'm riding down the middle, my handle bars are within 6" of the end of my lane. Meaning many, many cars would zoom past me within 6" at 50 mph.

71st is designed to be a freeway. 12' lanes, straight, and many lanes. I'm afraid you can't make a freeway pedestrian or biker friendly without major renovations (like the bike path set back from the Creek).

Like it or not, there will be some totally pedestrian and bicycle unfriendly roads in Tulsa.  71st is one of them

It appears that the picture was taken by the driver of a vehicle.  Shame on the picture taker for not being a driver first and a photographer second.

Assumption.

That appears to be looking east at 71st and College Ave.  If so, there are three eastbound lanes in about 38 feet of roadway.  The three westbound lanes and the center turn lane are about the same width as the eastbound lanes:  approximately 12 ft 8 in each.

That's an estimation from Google Earth measurements.  But if the seven lanes were all 11 feet wide, then the overall paved roadway, from north curb to south curb, could be almost twelve feet narrower.

The overall ROW width for 71st Street at that location is about 115 feet.  The sidewalks could be farther from the curbs.  But they aren't.  I'm not sure why the City allows our streets to be designed and constructed this way again and again, without regard to pedestrian and bicycle safety.

Using PonderInc's suggestion for 11-foot lanes, the overall roadway could have been 81 feet from curb to curb, instead of 93 feet (presuming seven lanes are needed at a location with an average of 30,000 vehicles per day).  By eliminating the center turn lane, the roadway could have been six lanes wide (70 feet from curb to curb).  And by keeping the center turn lane, but eliminating a traffic lane in each direction, the roadway could have been five lanes wide (59 feet from curb to curb).

Even as the roadway is now (seven lanes and about 93 feet curb to curb), the sidewalks could be about six feet farther from the curbs.  That would have been a better design and more pedestrian friendly.  It wouldn't have taken any more land, but there would be a strip of grass to maintain right next to a curb with cars whizzing by at 45 mph (for those abiding by the posted speed limit).  

Probably the least expensive way to modify 71st to make it more pedestrian and bike friendly would be to re-stripe the curbside lanes as dedicated bike lanes and installing bollards/barriers and/or planting trees to help protect the bike lanes from the moving traffic lanes.  Bus stops and shelters could be allowed at key locations.


That's the point Barbro [sic] Cox tried to make when she donned some heels and spiked along the edge of Riverside for her neighborhood's Garden Center/YouTube video.   :)