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| A popular tourist and commercial corridor will soon have bike lanes bringing order to the street traffic |
These lanes are going in because the residents and business owners of Fairmount, Spring Garden, and Francisville communities attended meetings, voted, and contacted City Council to say they wanted the lanes. Thank you for taking action to make our streets safer and Philadelphia more bike friendly.
Backed by overwhelmingly positive votes of support from the Fairmount Civic Association, Spring Garden Civic Association, Francisville Neighborhood Development Corporation, and the Fairmount Community Development Corporation and many businesses along the corridor, the Streets Department has green-lit the inclusion of the lanes into their striping plans. A big thank you to the Streets Department, Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities, and Councilman Bill Greenlee for making these lanes possible.
We do not know an exact date for the lanes' striping, but the Streets Department is making its best effort to get it done by this Fall. Once installed, the lanes will calm traffic by clearly designating vehicle flow, make people on bicycles more predictable and law-abiding, and increase the number of customers visiting Fairmount Ave businesses on bicycle.
Thank you to everyone who responded to our calls for action, attended meetings, took surveys and got the word out. You helped make these new lanes possible!
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| One of many many votes of support: this from the Spring Garden Civic Association |
2 comments:
"make people on bicycles more predictable and law-abiding"
Bike lanes make people on bikes more "law-abiding"? Because then they can go where they belong? I don't get it.
I'm not sure even "make people on bicycles more predictable" is a great framing of the issue; it implies that people on bikes are unpredictable if they don't have a bike lane, when in fact they're just trying their darndest not to get hit. Bike lanes also makes people in cars more predictable in that they are less likely to run into us. Maybe you could say that it makes car/bike traffic more predictable, rather than aiming at either set of traffic.
It's a fair point that bike lanes make all traffic more predictable (we sort of nod towards that by mentioning traffic calming).
But our annual bike counts have found that sidewalk riding and wrong-way riding go down on streets with bike lanes. Regardless of a bicyclist's attempt to navigate a street safely, both of those behaviors are never justified. (If a street is unsafe, walk your bike on the sidewalk).
So we do expect less of those two behaviors on Fairmount, which would amount to better and more predictable behavior.
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