Sunday, December 23, 2007

Can Bike Lanes Float?

I thought this was interesting concept, floating bike lanes. Useful on streets with part time parking such as Race St and Chestnut St. When parking is not allowed the area between the two solid stripes becomes a travel lane and the right side of the parking lane becomes a bikeable shoulder.

The study conducted by the San Francisco DOT is located here

The picture below is a floating bike lane along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Note that door zone is marked with the parking hash marks.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Dang, when I saw that headline I thought for sure you'd found a way to run a bike path the length of the Schuylkill AND the Delaware rivers.

Anonymous said...

John,

When I was out in San Fran last September for the big APBP conference in Davis I had an opportunity to ride the floating bike-lane along the Embarcadero. It was NOT all that intuitive. I rode it when parking was not allowed. Car drivers seemed to understand the concept but I felt a little unnerved. It didn't help that the stripes and paint had come up in many places. The "T"s you see in the picture however do a great job of keeping cyclists out of the door zone.

messedup said...

I wish I lived in a city where we had enough room on the roads for something like this. Unfortunately living in a medieval city, Dublin, means that there is barely enough room for traditional bike lanes, and most of those are used as extra parking spots for cars, illegally of course...