Description
This busy stretch of New Haven roadway, one of the few logical ways to get from Union Station to downtown is painted with a meager shared lane marking for cyclists. It's a bit frustrating.
Orange St also has only sharrows for much of its length. One can find evidence of even more relatively useless shared lane markings being added all over the city instead of actual bike lanes. Even traditional class 2 bike lanes are pretty outmoded these days, let alone sharrows.
It would be nice to bike with less anxiety and fear in New Haven.
12 Comments
PatRides (Guest)
apzzz (Registered User)
City of New Haven (Verified Official)
commentor (Guest)
Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking (Registered User)
bikera (Guest)
Thanks for your response, DPT.
I think the intent of the original post and the ten of us who have voted for this post is to lodge a complaint against the use of sharrows in itself. Personally, I want to call attention to the fact that the sharrow is pretty much useless for making cyclists feel safe and protecting them on the road. San Diego is a notoroius abuser of the sharrow, for instance--rather than make tough decisions to install bike lanes and redistribute some much needed road space to cyclists, they simply sharrowed their city's bike network. To be honest, they are mostly a waste of paint. Their "experimental" (in CT anyhow) nature does not make up for the fact that it is the result of a lack of willingness on the part of the city to make tough decisions about making streets safer for cyclists, even when it requires taking away some space for motor vehicle lanes. State Street for instance would be fine with a buffered, separated bike lane and a single car lane.
Motorist (Guest)
Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking (Registered User)
An anonymous SeeClickFix user (Registered User)
To the DPT official, you write: "Please understand that the use of sharrows was and still is a foundational aspect to more advanced road markings in support of bicycle infrastructure." By this are you suggesting that sharrows are a stepping stone to better infrastructure? I know its hard to commit to that, but I'm just curious if that is part of what you're implying.
Sure, sharrows are maybe better than nothing. But the real test of whether they are effective is whether it gets more folks biking the routes made with sharrows. Do sharrows on busy, unsafe streets with fast moving traffic (say Chapel Streeet all throughout downtown and Wooster Square) help any cyclists or help to get more cyclists on the road beyond those who are already super-confident and able to bike very fast? Take State St. for instance. Instead of using that stenciled route just to get to my office at Wall and Church, I bike up that stump of Orange Street that is an on-ramp, past the police station, get in the wrong lane to get up on the sidewalk and ride the sidewalk along the freeway stub to get over to Church St. At Church I wait awhile to get the pedestrian signal and then get up onto Church St and bike Church the rest of the way to work (Church has so many traffic lanes on it I usually feel safe -- it should have a bike lane, there's no need for that many traffic lanes). So instead of taking the supposedly improved, sharrowed route on State I do that illegal, irritating work around because all in all it feels safer an I don't have to go up hill with an aggressive CT motorist charging up my rear with the hope that the shared-lane marking with cool their temper. And I have thousands of miles of riding experience and have been a cyclist for 15 years.
That's the test of whether sharrows are any good on certain streets I think--will people actually use them? Will they make cycling more appealing to more folks so the city isn't so choked with fast-moving unsafe traffic? A sharrow by itself without effect is not worthwhile.
That's the last I'll say--at some level I know we just have a difference of opinion and I know that sharrows are new to CT and it might take some time for their inefficacy to sink in.
Thanks for your replies.
City of New Haven (Verified Official)
City of New Haven (Verified Official)
Closed City of New Haven (Registered User)